Oil & Gas Innovation Summer 2020 Digital | Page 47

Trouble-free I&C data migration in production plants The migration in Europe was carried out gradually over two years. It was important not to let it interfere with operating processes, so to achieve this a unified migration plan and realistic time schedules were drawn up for all BASF’s production plants in Europe. After exhaustive testing of the whole migration process at selected pilot plants, it was implemented successively. Each weekend the data of about 20 plants at a time were transferred: to do this, at the end of the week the plant operators blocked access to the databases of the old system generation ProDOK 9.5, started the automatic checking of the database contents for consistency and integrity, performed any corrections, and stored the pre-checked data contents in a standard format. These were then made available to Rösberg by remote access. Then, each Friday evening, the IT specialists loaded the data packages onto high-performance servers. There, they were automatically migrated and compared with the predefined standard format for the results, any discrepancies that occurred were analyzed and semi-automatically corrected. Additional support by BASF personnel was not required for this. On each Monday morning the migrated databases were then installed by BASF on new central database servers. The employees in production and technical units at the BASF locations, who had been trained beforehand, were able to start working with the new system straight away. Of course, Rösberg had prepared a fallback plan in case at any point the migration did not run smoothly over the weekend – but they never had to use it. The external costs of Rösberg for the Europewide migration project were manageable. Expressed in terms of the individual loops in the 300 or so production plants, they worked out at approximately half a euro per loop. eCl@ss Advanced is an ISO- and IEC-compliant, cross-sectoral standard ideally suited to describe the technical data of devices. It is unrivaled at present, at least in Europe (Above). In future, suppliers of equipment to BASF will have to supply the data for their devices in eCl@ ss Advanced format. This will further improve the asbuilt documentation(Right). (Copyright: Rösberg). The use of ProDOK ensures security of investment. For decades the software has been upwardly compatible and future-safe (Copyright: Rösberg). The benefits for users in production and technical units The cost and effort of the migration is demonstrably worthwhile – as evidenced by the many advantages of the unified databases for the whole of Europe that were created during the migration: The new system architecture of ProDOK NG now fulfills the current requirements of BASF’s IT for a centralized server, IT installations as unified as possible and Europe-wide accesses compliant with general information protection regulations. This makes it possible to conduct analyses and integrate new applications both on both a plant-wide and a cross-locational basis. The unified datapool based on standards like eCl@ss Advanced also helps avoid “uncontrolled growth” in future, thus minimizing the necessary maintenance effort in the long term. Thanks to the standardization of reports and forms in ProDOK NG it is largely irrelevant which big location within Europe employees are assigned to – they will quickly find their way around the I&C plant documentation there. Thus personnel can be deployed more flexibly, and the same flexibility extends to contract partners, further simplifying the outsourcing of individual work steps. This also applies to all work with I&C documentation based on the web application LiveDOK. web, which can be used independently of the operating system on all the usual mobile devices on the market. Asset management also benefits from this. For the first time, information can be called up at the touch of a button about which technical components/devices are installed in which plants throughout the whole of Europe. This is advantageous, for instance, if there are faults relating to a specific device, as well as in failure analyses and the preparation of DCS migrations. As equipment suppliers are required in future to deliver device data in eCl@ss Advanced format, these device specifications can be directly integrated into the I&C-CAE system, making the as-built documentation even better. The switch to an I&C-CAE system is definitely worthwhile Companies who have not yet acquired a modern I&C-CAE system can also benefit from all these advantages. In this way they can avoid the problems that crop up in everyday work again and again without an efficient I&C planning and documentation tool. In such cases inconsistent documentation, as typically produced with the use of Office tools for planning, is a standard point of criticism with audits by customers, supervisory authorities and internal revision management. In the worst case, if safety problems occur in the plant and it needs to be demonstrated that all relevant regulations have been observed, reliable documentation can be extremely important for an enterprise. • Rösberg Engineering GmbH W: www.roesberg.com, www.LiveDOK.com E: [email protected] T: [phone]