Desalination Megaprojects: Product Specification Structure and Data

It does not matter how perfect the procurement software is, it fails if it is agnostic to the procured products and services. How to select their essential properties needed for the software enhancement is the focus of this article.

A product technical specification (TS) is a core of the purchase order, the binding contract, and conditional payments. For a seller, TS is a source of ideas for future product development and its competitiveness assessment.

TS is not copyrighted, but by default, it is subject to a non-disclosure agreement as it is deemed to contain sensitive information about the buyer/seller. These points shall be well thought out before sharing TS on the company website as part of the strategy to attract more bidders.

TS is a set of technical requirements and features that a procured product shall have. As part of the product warranty, they cover the product design, construction, functionality, procurement scope, warranty, manufacturing schedule, inspection and test plan, documentation hand-over, installation and maintenance, and even performance degradation over time.

The TS collection supersets or complements the international and local standards. Together with the latter, it forms a legal basis for desalination plant engineering. It starts with TS and ends with TS.

The TS collection normally includes over 100 entries. Continually updating the TS collection is extremely time-consuming and difficult as it requires expertise in merging upgrades of the products on the market with lessons learned from existing desalination plants operation.

This task, which is next to impossible for any desalination company, is a perfect candidate for automation as the TS structure follows the same logic pattern whether it is applied to a 2-inch valve or a desalination plant worth millions of dollars.

The TS content structure

The TS content may be classified in the following way reflecting the information volatility.

1. the content specific to the current project (item attributes)

2. the content valid across all the projects executed by a company (global item attributes)

3. the content describing business rules related to design, construction, or testing and valid for all the company projects

4. the content valid across all the projects executed in the industry (global product attributes)

5. the relationships of a specific TS to other TSs and international and local standards

The above-mentioned points may be illustrated by TS for a pump feeding reverse osmosis membranes with seawater. (It is the most sophisticated piece of equipment)

Content 1

The item attributes' examples are seawater flow rate and pressure, the pump type, motor voltage, size, and number.

Content 2

The global attributes' example is the pump construction details like mechanical sealing, enclosed double suction staggered type impeller, or dynamic balancing of assembled impellers and rotor according to the G2.5 1940 standard. This point is negotiated only once with a vendor.

Content 3

Examples of the business rules are selecting the bearing type, the vibration sensors count, or the test types as functions of the pump size.

Content 4

The global product attributes' example is the usage of super-duplex steel, standard levels of vibration and loads on the pump flanges, API-compatible oil lubrication system, sound pressure levels, QA procedures, etc. These pre-defined points are hardly negotiable.

This content is critical as a manufacturer may not be acquainted with the industry practices. For example, not all pump manufacturers work with corrosion-resistant materials applied in large-scale desalination.

Content 5

The pump in question is packaged with meters like a temperature sensor, velocity transmitter, and torque meter specified in different TSs. In other words, the abovementioned TS collection is not flat, it has an internal logic hierarchy.

As seen, the TS contains parts that differ in generality and lifespan, more fundamental parts have longer lifespans.

At the finer level, the same observation holds true for each content type - the device attributes described in words are less prone to change than the numerical attributes like rotation speed, pressure, flow rate, etc.

To leverage the abovementioned observation companies split TS into two parts - the textual file and the datasheet mostly containing the numerical data.

TS content sources

The TS collection is discipline-oriented, its order-of-magnitude breakdown for desalination megaprojects is given below.

1. electrical - 10%

2. mechanical - 15%

3. instrumentation & control (I&C) - 20%

4. process - 55%

All these TS groups are interrelated: the process group references the I&C group, while the electrical and mechanical groups - the process one.

As follows, the biggest portion of the TS collection comes from process engineering. The process-type TS summarizes the data from P&ID, engineering reports, the equipment list accompanying P&ID, and the plant control philosophy. (An excerpt from the control philosophy is often the first paragraph of TS.) TS for bulky equipment includes its spatial arrangement sketch - the excerpt from the plant layout.

We may say that TS is a pinnacle of project engineering.

Quality Control

Quality Control (QC) instructions are a final part of TS. QC traces the lifecycle of the purchase order - the product design, raw materials supply, machining and assembly, in-factory and on-site testing, and compiling the Manufacturing Records Book (MRB). Here the main concern is how to plug QC into the manufacturing process without affecting its schedule and costs.

The QC instructions may include (but are not limited to)

1. references to the industry standards

2. clarifications on their application

3. the test types to perform

4. product acceptance criteria

5. formats of inspection reports, certificates, and nameplates

6. the QC milestones and document submittals schedule

Legacy TS

Legacy TSs include single-file documents in use for 5 - 10 years without any update. As they are either generic or rarely used, their updates are considered not worth the effort. Neither their conversion into a format native to the TS automation framework.

With the TS structure and data sources defined we may move to the next point - the TS auto-generation.

Reprinted from crenger.com