Identifying goals
Pörner Group is a leading independent engineering contractor for process plants in Central Europe, with more than 50 years of experience in the process industry, Pörner is globally known for high-level plant engineering and construction project execution. The company needed new tools for specifications and materials management as well as a solution to create a centralized location where all the engineering tools could be hosted with minimum administrative effort.
After careful consideration, Pörner selected Smart Materials and Forte Reference Data to be hosted in a Citrix environment to enhance the piping specifications and materials management. When hosted in a Citrix environment, all the software tools could be run in a centralized manner. With this solution, Pörner aimed to bridge the gap from component and pipe class specifications to engineering as well as between engineering and procurement processes. This would enable a centralized license management for all subsidiaries where spec management, engineering, material management and site management could be hosted and provided to customers as one package from one provider.
Overcoming challenges
At the beginning of the project, Pörner already had an existing workflow running in an old system environment between the spec management, engineering and construction site. In this system, all the applications were installed and running in a client/server environment that led into a large amount of manual, administrative effort. There was no centralized data management, as multiple clients with different versions of applications were running on different locations, using multiple separate data storages. This also led to high travel costs as Pörner employees had to manage the resources in different locations.
The existing system was developed in-house, making integration with third-party systems, as well as upgrading operating systems and databases, a manual and time-consuming task. Changing into a centralized Citrix environment would enable Pörner to better allocate IT resources and work-hours that were currently used for manual data management.
Realizing results
Originally, Pörner chose Octave Forte Solutions to improve materials and specs management due to the solutions’ excellent out of the box interfaces with 3D design solutions. In addition, as a longtime Octave customer, Pörner was familiar with Octave’s high-quality software and services. The entire Pörner Group was already using Octave solutions for the overall engineering process, from study phase (pre-FEED) and FEED (front-end engineering design) to detail design (3D systems), as well as for the analyses down to material management and site management.
The newly purchased solutions,Forte Reference Data and Smart Materials, completed the existing engineering solutions suite, and when implemented in a Citrix environment would enable a centralized approach to spec and materials management.
Standard Database for Forte Reference Data was used to migrate all the existing data from the in-house system to Forte Reference Data. After this, the workflows in Forte Reference Data and Smart Materials were customized to enable importing Bill of Materials. Octave also helped Pörner to customize reporting and configure CAD interfaces to enable smooth information flow between the different disciplines.
Thomas Hermann, project and CAD administrator at Pörner, commented on the overall project execution with Octave: “Pörner has a good relationship with Octave for many years now, and this was also one of the reasons why we chose to invest in more Octave software. The overall implementation was as high quality as expected – and the quality of data and workflows exceeded our expectations.”
Moving forward
In the future, all pipe classes that are mostly managed in Forte Reference Data will be managed in a central database for all Pörner subsidiaries. Pipe specs for all 3D engineering systems like PDS®, Forte 3D (formerly Intergraph Smart 3D), Forte Isometrics (formerly Smart Isometrics) and Forte 3DWorx (formerly CADWorx Plant Professional), as well as PDMS, will be provided from a central Citrix location. In addition, the material management including procurement and site management will be handled by Smart Materials on a central location using the same database as Forte Reference Data.
