Dow, DuPont, and Shell Global Solutions Sponsoring Process Industry Data Integration Strategy

Houston - The Dow Chemical Company, DuPont, and Shell* Global Solutions International B.V. (Shell) announced that they are collaborating with FIATECH in the United States and with POSC Caesar and USPI-NL in Europe to co-sponsor the development of a consistent process industry data integration strategy to improve productivity of the capital project and facility life cycle. This initiative will enable engineering, operations, and maintenance teams to more effectively work together within an enterprise and allow contractors and suppliers to work with owner operators from outside the enterprise. One element of this strategy is the use of a common Reference Data Library (RDL) that defines standard equipment classifications and equipment-naming conventions and facilitates the sharing of equipment information.

Dow, DuPont, and Shell have been working to assemble a process industry coalition to address and drive shared or standardized data integration solutions to facilitate the sharing of information across the capital facility supply chain that includes the owner operator, Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) contractors, and equipment suppliers. The process industry recognizes that developing proprietary or single company solutions is no longer cost effective.

The business benefit of improved end-to-end data integration and information management is estimated by the process industry to be a 20 percent to 30 percent productivity improvement in engineering, operations, and maintenance activities. The improvement will be found through reuse, access to accurate information, and automation of manual hand-offs including significant data feeds to ERP systems. Furthermore, a report for the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) by RTI International and the Logistics Management Institute states, "This report estimates the cost of inadequate interoperability in the U.S. capital facilities industry to be $15.8 billion per year."

On August 8 and 9, 2005, DuPont sponsored a Process Industry Data Integration Workshop in Wilmington, Delaware, attended by 26 data integration experts representing 22 international companies and agencies. Significant workshop accomplishments included:

• Alignment of views and a sharing of data integration knowledge.
• Relationship building between North American and European experts.
• Greater understanding and status of the relevant international standards and the management/infrastructure process, AEX project, and XMpLant.
• Comparison and analysis of existing data integration solutions.
• A path forward agreed to by attending owner operators, EPC contractors, software suppliers, and consortia including goals, strategy, and project plans addressing priorities and logical sequence of future activities.

The essence of the consensus workshop path forward was to drive toward a single process industry RDL, ISO- 15926-4 TS (the standard list of terms and definitions), and to use that consensus terminology standard in further projects to define and deploy industry-consensus object information models. This strategy has been supported by Aker Kvaerner, AspenTech, Aveva, Bechtel, Bentley Systems, Dow, DuPont, ePlantData, FIATECH, Fluor, Intergraph, Noumenon, POSC Caesar, Shell Global Solutions , and USPI-NL. In support of this strategy, the FIATECH Capital Projects Technology Roadmap, Element #9, Life Cycle Data Management and Information Integration Team, is preparing a project to accelerate deployment of ISO 15926. Further dialogue and consensus building will be pursued with other members of the process industry, including the large contingent of equipment suppliers.

SOURCE: The Dow Chemical Company, DuPont, and Shell* Global Solutions