Plant Integrity Management Digitizes Common Oil, Gas & Chemical Process With Bluebeam Revu
Background
Plant Integrity Management is a UK-based consulting firm that provides assurance and verification services, corrosion consultancy, fabric maintenance, and inspection consultancy for oil, gas and chemical plants and offshore rigs. The firm has worked with several leading firms, including Premier Oil, Talisman Energy and PDO. As part of their services, the firm creates PDFs and offshore inspection workpacks, which they markup to visually denote anomalies when performing condition assessments. Historically, all this work has been done with pen and paper.
Challenge
Like many firms in the industry, Plant Integrity Management relied on paper-based communication processes, which presented difficulties such as keeping up-to-date drawings and maintaining them in the harsh conditions of plants and offshore rigs. Additionally, the firm was limited by paper-based workflows, which at times can make it harder to see the big picture. After Plant Integrity Management discovered Bluebeam Revu, a PDF-based solution for digitally managing and marking up documents and drawings throughout the life of a project, the firm began to take a deeper look at their communication processes. They wanted to go paperless, but also take their workflows to the next level. After testing Revu’s PDF markup and editing capabilities in several workflows, including creating inspection workpacks, marking anomalies on P&IDs and producing risk-based inspections, the firm rolled out Revu to its engineering team.
Solution
Plant Integrity Management is now using Bluebeam Revu to digitize the following processes:
Corrosion Circuits
Corrosion circuits are created to divide a system/platform into manageable inspection schedules dependent on their corrosion threats. Plant Integrity Management creates colored circuits using Revu’s PDF layers feature, which allows markups to be assigned to a layer that can be turned on and displayed or turned off and hidden, onto the P&IDs to highlight the different inspection areas.
Process Flow Diagrams Creation and Markup
To markup PDFs, the firm uses Revu’s customizable markup tools—including a highlighter, lines with various styles and end points, callouts, clouds and industry-standard symbols—saved in tool sets, which can be reused with just a click across sessions of Revu. This technology enables engineers to digitally draw a summarized overview of the entire platform and platform systems. Using Revu’s markup functionality also enables these drawings to be created with multiple layering of items including corrosion circuits, anomalies and process flow conditions.
Inspection Workpacks
To provide clear instructions to offshore partners, engineers are now using Revu to highlight and annotate P&IDs with notes for inspections. By digitally commenting on drawings, the firm reduces the risk of smudged felt-tip pen marks or bad photocopies obscuring important details.
Condition Assessment
To assess the condition of equipment, engineers now use Revu to put anomalies onto their correct location on P&IDs. Doing so highlights areas of concern with a much easier visual representation than in a database. The firm is also using Revu’s hyperlinking technology, which enables users to hyperlink markups to relevant PDF pages, snapshot views or other files and to connect anomaly comments to their corresponding reports. As a result, all relevant project data is just a click away.
Results
Revu has provided several benefits to Plant Integrity Management. “Before Bluebeam, all this work was done by hand. Now that we are using Revu, we are able to create electronic drawings that better enable us to quickly manage change,” said Jennifer Geddes, Corrosion Engineer. “For example, if equipment or flowlines are changed, we can easily move the markup onto the new P&ID without a lot of work. We can also use one master set of P&IDs with multiple layers of markups, which makes it easier for us and our clients to see various details and the big picture.”