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When a company is building any kind of process plant they must respect three aspects: schedule, cost and quality. These elements form a sort of three-legged stool from the customer’s perspective and should any one of them fall short, the whole project is out of balance, perhaps dramatically so.

Yet maintaining that delicate balance is no mean feat given all the various players and moving parts involved. You have engineers that each have their own piece of the puzzle to contend with, be it electrical, process, instrumentation or automation. Each has to follow a plan and a schedule while providing their respective design, devices or configurations that must work well together.

What’s more, none of these folks really talk the same language, literally and figuratively. The speeds and feeds that may be of concern to the automation expert are likely quite different from the issues that concern the process engineers, and so on. On top of that, it’s quite likely these days that plant designs are coming from teams around the globe, so there’s also a traditional best practices barrier to contend with.

This is the environment into which Schneider Electric has for years been implementing its control and safety solutions, which function as the brain and nervous system of a plant. To be successful at that job, accurate process data is required. It must be defined which equipment and devices are going into the plant and what they are expected to do. If it’s a valve, we need to know when it’s supposed to be open, for how long and what to do if anything should go wrong. If it’s a safety switch, we need to know what it refers to, what exactly should cause it to trip, and so on.

To accomplish this, we essentially need to get inside the head of the process experts and translate what they tell us into language that can be understood by the process and safety system that will run the plant.

Historically, it’s when it comes to assembling the different process parts that things tend to go awry and get off plan. If the data we need isn’t available on time, it could cause delays and, potentially, cost over-runs. The schedule gets squeezed, as the automation team will be trying to play catch-up at some point down the line...