Plant and Asset Management in the Chemical and Other Process Industries

Companies involved in the chemical and other process-oriented industries face a number of challenges today:

Increasing globalization and open markets are forcing companies to try to continue to reduce costs and improve efficiencies
Continued mergers and acquisitions result in an increasing need to efficiently share information across a widely dispersed organization
Engineering and construction projects are being outsourced to engineering and construction firms, resulting in an increasing need to communicate with these firms effectively
Ever-increasing government regulations and safety and environmental requirements place another growing burden on these organizations

At Hagerman & Company, we offer a solution that can help meet some of these needs. InnoCielo Meridian Enterprise from BlueCielo ECM Solutions (formerly Cyco Software) targets this market with a number of unique capabilities and features including:

Engineering Content Management (ECM) � InnoCielo Meridian Enterprise can manage all types of engineering drawings and documents such as standard operating procedures, P&IDs, work instructions, data sheets, etc., with full integration with both 2D and 3D CAD systems including AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks and Microstation. Features in this area include a fully secure document vault, check in/check out, document release/workflow, revision history, searching, viewing, printing, redlining, electronic approval and sign off.
Project Collaboration and Document Transmittals � Meridian�s web client and Briefcase functionality make it easy to collaborate with outside engineering and construction firms. If you desire, the full web client can give outside parties the capability to check in/check out, participate in workflows and add new documents to the system or you can give outside parties a lower level of read-only access and restrict them only to seeing documents related to the projects they are working on.

The Briefcase functionality provides a way for Meridian users to package documents together in a Zip type file and send them to outside parties. Features of Briefcases include packaging/zipping of files into a single package, automatic inclusion/handling of document/CAD reference documents, automatic generation of transmittal records and forms, e-mail notifications, check in/check out or copy out options, creation of a record of the Briefcase in the Meridian system for audit trail purposes and more.
Integration with Maintenance Systems � In a typical facility, there are thousands of assets which are identified by a unique number. These assets are usually managed in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). The problem with these systems is that they lack engineering data management functionality so that they can manage the hundreds of thousands technical documents and their complex relations to the assets.

With the InnoCielo Asset Management module, documents in the Meridian system are linked to the assets in the maintenance management system so that the maintenance department will automatically have the most up-to-date documents immediately available without losing any time searching, interrupting plant engineering or risk grabbing an outdated version of a document. Maintenance engineers can find and view all asset-related documents from within the CMMS using the embedded InnoCielo Viewer. Any comments or redlines added by maintenance personnel go straight to engineering and get entered on their To-Do list.

InnoCielo Meridian Enterprise can fully integrate with popular CMMS systems such SAP PM, MRO Maximo, DataStream, Maintenance Connection and others.
Plant Access � With the InnoCielo Shop Floor client, plant users can quickly and easily pull up, view and print the documents they need simply by typing in or selecting values for equipment number, plant area, building, discipline, document type etc., using a very low-cost interface that requires little or no training
Publishing to the Enterprise � Beyond maintenance, engineering may also need to share documents with other departments and systems in the organization as well. Users in these other departments typically should not or do not have the ability to view documents in their native formats. As a result, the InnoCielo Publisher offers the ability to automatically publish engineering documents such as CAD files to industry standard formats such as PDF or DWF based on a Meridian event such as document check in, release or workflow approval.

In addition, Meridian has the ability to automatically publish released documents to other popular enterprise document management systems that lack engineering/CAD functionality such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Documentum, FileNet and Hummingbird.

In addition to InnoCielo Meridian Enterprise, BlueCielo also offers InnoCielo TeamWork which offers all of the basic functionality of Meridian in a lower-cost system.

BlueCielo has been providing data and document management solutions to companies around the world for over 20 years. BlueCielo has over 275,000 users in 50 countries around the world and has experienced rapid worldwide growth in the last two years. In addition, InnoCielo Meridian Enterprise has just been nominated as a finalist in the Productivity Software category of Plant Engineering�s Product of the Year competition. Companies in the chemical and other process-oriented industries already using InnoCielo Meridian include Sigma Chemical, Corn Products, Alberto-Culver, Tyco, Unilever, Baxter Healthcare, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Huntsman Chemical.