The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts (Part 2 - Owner – Specifying the new plant requirements)

(This is the second of a series looking at the benefits of using promis•e in all phases of the Plant design process)
The new Plant Owner is an expert in their industry. They know what they require the new plant to do and provide one or more EPC's with a set of requirements to meet in doing their design. They may have had similar plants before and have had experience with what has, and what has not worked at other locations. Providing that knowledge to the EPC's to implement in their designs is normally done at a fairly high level. Existing designs are often in many different formats in drawings so difficult to navigate, that trying to reuse the detailed information takes more time than passing the EPC high level requirements and letting them recreate their own interpretation of the requirements.
When an existing plant has been done in promis•e extracting and re-using detailed information becomes much simpler. Promis•e projects all allow for two major levels of structure. A project can be a whole plant or part of a plant. Physical areas within the project are divided into "installations". Installations are divided into "Locations". These levels can be sub-divided down to represent everything from entire buildings to individual subpanels. They can also be used to track not only geographic subdivision of a project but also functional hierarchies which specify the function a portion of the design serves. Every component, wire, cable, and drawing can be assigned to a specific installation and location. The result is that if an individual portion of a Plant is going to serve as a basis for a new design, it is easy to specify or cut out that portion of a project to handover to an EPC to duplicate or modify. The benefits to the Owner of having their existing Plant drawings in promis•e are that:
• Portions of a Plant to be emulated in a new plant can be quickly referred to and provided easily.
• The information is more detailed than just providing high level requirements.
• Design across plants can become more standardized which leads to lower maintenance, operational and training costs.
Next: (Part 3 -EPC: Getting the requirements)