How can you maintain and update your plant design documentation?

1 Why is it important?

Maintaining and updating your plant design documentation is not only a legal requirement, but also a strategic advantage. It can help to prevent accidents, errors, and delays due to outdated or inaccurate information, as well as optimize the design, operation, and maintenance of your plant processes and utilities. Additionally, it allows you to comply with relevant codes, standards, and regulations in your industry and region. Furthermore, it can enhance communication, collaboration, and knowledge transfer among your plant staff, contractors, and stakeholders.

2 What are the challenges?

Maintaining and updating your plant design documentation can be challenging due to the volume and complexity of the documentation, which can span multiple disciplines, formats, and sources. Changes may be frequent and wide-ranging, resulting from plant modifications, repairs, upgrades, expansions, or decommissioning. The coordination and integration of these changes often involves different teams, departments, and external parties. Additionally, the quality and consistency of the documentation may depend on the skills, tools, and standards used by document creators and reviewers. Lastly, the accessibility and security of the documentation is affected by the storage, distribution, and protection methods and policies employed.

3 How can you overcome them?

To ensure successful maintenance and updating of plant design documentation, it is necessary to establish and follow a systematic and structured approach. This approach should include defining the objectives, scope, and requirements of the documentation project; identifying existing documentation sources and assessing their accuracy, completeness, and relevance; planning and scheduling documentation activities and resources; executing and monitoring the activities; and delivering and maintaining the documentation outputs. Furthermore, tasks such as collecting, analyzing, producing, editing, checking, validating, testing, distributing, storing, archiving, training users and stakeholders, evaluating the documentation performance, revising it as needed should be taken into consideration.

4 What are the best practices?

To ensure the success and sustainability of your documentation project, you should adopt a plant design management system (PDMS) that integrates and automates the documentation processes and functions across the plant lifecycle. It’s also important to use a standard and consistent documentation format, style, and terminology that follows industry and company guidelines. Additionally, you should apply a modular and hierarchical documentation structure to facilitate navigation, search, and reuse of components and elements. Leveraging a digital and cloud-based documentation platform is also essential for creating, storing, accessing, and sharing documentation in real-time from anywhere. Moreover, you should implement a quality assurance and control system to ensure accuracy, reliability, and validity of the content and format. Finally, engaging with stakeholders and users to solicit feedback, input, and approval is key for successful documentation projects.

5 What are the benefits?

Maintaining and updating your plant design documentation can bring many benefits, such as improving safety, efficiency, and compliance of operations and maintenance. It can also reduce risks, costs, and time associated with design and engineering projects. Additionally, it can increase productivity, profitability, and competitiveness of your plant business and performance. Moreover, this documentation can enhance visibility, transparency, and accountability of design processes and outcomes. Finally, it can build trust, confidence, and satisfaction of stakeholders and customers.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?