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Exploration & Production: The Oil And Gas Review 2006 - October 2006 -
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Traditional engineering services fit into welldefined niches. Each member of the engineering team – the end-user, the engineering contractor, the construction company, the equipment manufacturer, the representative, the consultant and the project manager – used to clearly understand their role in the design, construction and on-going operation of a facility. In today’s world of ‘doing more with less’, the continuous trend towards outsourcing all but the core competences and the imminent retirement of many of the knowledge workers and the disappearance of years of experience with them, the roles of the engineering team members are undergoing a fundamental change.
The most significant change and the catalyst for all this transition is that most end-user companies, those that make various products, no longer maintain a cadre of engineers on-staff but instead rely on others to perform this task for them – in some cases for ‘free’. End-user companies felt that they could no longer justify the expense of a highly paid in-house group of employees whose services could be obtained less expensively under contract. Acquiring engineering services on a contract basis worked fine as long as the former employees were still available to provide their knowledge when required through a contracting organisation; however, these former employees moved on to other fields or the facility in which they used to work had changed so much that their knowledge was no longer as relevant as it once was.
Compounding the problem was the desire to make all technical people on staff generalists. Such generalists know something about everything but never have the opportunity to truly learn anything in depth and, in many cases, it is the details that are important. Alternatively, these generalists become project managers, co-ordinating or overseeing the activities of other engineers or consultants. If this is truly the future, the question is how it will play out and what will be the roles of each of the players during each phase of a project life-cycle.
Engineering Contractors
Engineering contractors are key players in the early stages of a project’s life as they are responsible for the development of the process diagrams that illustrate how the various components of the facility are to link and interact. The control narrative that describes how the plant is to be operated and controlled is now frequently also a deliverable with the process and instrumentation diagram (P&ID). Part of the reason for the requirement of the control narrative is that the process could be developed or licensed from the engineering firm or, conversely, the facility for which the process is being created does not have the in-house expertise in either or both the process engineering or automation and control disciplines.
During the construction phase of a facility, the larger engineering contractors are in fact engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies, who are able to manage the entire project from concept to turnkey operation as a lump-sum. If this is not the case, the engineering company typically passes on the engineered package to another firm for construction and is then available to the manufacturer as a consultant on any issues or questions arising during construction.
Another approach that is being seen on a more regular basis, at least for the automation portion of a project, is to separate the automation and control scope of a project from the complete scope and hire a general automation contractor to provide this as a turnkey solution. To be able to make best use of this option, the control system supplier is generally selected quite early in the design process and then becomes part of the design team, working in parallel with the general engineering contractor responsible for the process, mechanical and electrical scopes of work.
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Ian Verhappen is a Director at
ICE-Pros, an independent instrument
and control engineering consulting
firm specialising in fieldbus, process
analyser systems and oil sands
automation. He is also a fellow of
the Instrumentation, Systems and
Automation Society (ISA).
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