OnSite Spool Design (formerly Intergraph Spoolgen) has been at the heart of the Octave digital chain for piping for many years, as it allows for the digital transfer of the design between engineering and fabrication companies, usually via Piping Component Files (PCF).
The digital piping chain using OnSite Spool Design is highly productive, but extra automation can supercharge the workflow. In this post, I share a few customer examples.
Core OnSite Spool Design
The OnSite Spool Design fabricator plans the work by splitting the design using field welds to create spools. Spools are the units in which the piping is transferred to the job site, and OnSite Spool Design users make the changes required to enable the piping to be transportable. They cannot make engineering changes, so the integrity of the design stays intact. This core OnSite Spool Design workflow allows new deliverables based on the spools – such as Forte Isogen (formerly Intergraph Isogen) drawings and reports – to be produced. We can add automation to pass these reports onto other systems.
Improving data quality
Sometimes data received from a third-party engineering company can improve through automation. For example, line list data is absent, or the pipe thickness or material may be buried in the component descriptions. We can automatically add this data when we import the piping files. We have also developed techniques for categorizing welds before the work begins by analyzing exactly which components are welded together.
Material planning
You can identify all the materials needed to fabricate the pipeline when you receive the piping data digitally. Fabricators typically use a material management system, such as Octave Loop Core (formerly Intergraph Smart Materials) to control the piping stock, which can provide a content inventory of the warehouse. We have developed automation to compare each spool's components against this inventory to see if the spool is currently fabricable.
Cost estimation
There are two main sources of cost in a fabrication project: time and materials. The materials are easy to account for, but the time is harder to estimate. We have worked with several customers to estimate the work hours required to make each spool. Typical activities are welding, cutting and painting but can also include handling the pipe or any other time-consuming activity that the piping data can determine.
As OnSite Spool Design imports the data digitally, we know sizes, weights and materials of each component, so we can assign factors for all the welds required. The more activities captured, the better the quality of the estimates. This can even happen at the bidding stage if the 3D data is supplied.
Benefits
All of these examples show that there are big benefits to adding extra automation to the core OnSite Spool Design. Small investments ahead of projects can result in large savings, and the more complex the automation, the larger the return. If you have any time-consuming steps in your fabrication workflows, get in touch and see how OnSite Spool Design can help.