MAKING YOUR PRODUCT: PROCESS PLANT DESIGN AND BUILD

Designing a process plant to create products entails either the design of completely new facilities or the modification of existing facilities. The design starts at a conceptual level and ultimately ends in the form of fabrication and construction plans. Industrial plant design will often include many unit operations. In order to build or scale up an industrial plant, you will need the services of a company that can prove sound plant and unit operation knowledge, together with experience in a wide variety of industries and applications.

Any process engineering and management company will need extensive knowledge of your product and process in order to develop a solution that meets your budget and timeline.

From equipment selection to construction management, to finally co-ordinating the entire scope of the project, the undertaking will follow a complex process requiring a highly professional and focused approach.

Front-end Engineering

This first step is to initiate the plan. Plant Design Engineers will fully extract the project scope, discuss potential challenges, and create a comprehensive project schedule up-front. This is a critical first step in developing your plant. An ideal plant design and engineering company believes engineering detail is most important in the beginning of the project. Spending essential time up-front to provide accurate preliminary pricing and a design you can be confident with, is the first priority of a reliable industrial plant design and engineering company. Typically, companies offer three levels of front-end engineering, with each step requiring more engineering.

Detailed Design

The second step begins the detailed design, which includes a tightening of the numbers and scope of your project. Once fixed bid price has been reached, the following begins:

• Re-evaluating for further time/cost savings
• Setting key project milestones and dates
• Finalising modular industrial plant design.

Equipment Procurement

The third step, once plant design engineers have completed detailed engineering, encompasses the ordering of the equipment required for your project. Equipment with long lead times, or key to project milestones, is ordered first. Equipment is selected upon lowest total lifetime cost, as opposed to lowest upfront cost. If your process requires any safety study, (HAZOP for instance) this will be completed during design. Timing depends on your availability and the information needed to complete the design.

Industrial Plant Construction

This fourth key step of industrial plant construction should take place in a controlled  fabrication area. A compressed build timeline, higher quality construction and lower total modular fabrication costs are direct outcomes of the controlled, production-style environment. Parallel field upgrades happen simultaneously with industrial plant construction without interfering with each other, as plants should be constructed in-shop as modules, while site-upgrades happen at your manufacturing facility.

Installation and Commissioning

And finally, step five: once off-site industrial plant construction is complete, modules are fully FAT tested and then shipped to your site for installation. Process experts install your new production plant and make sure it is fully integrated, both mechanically and electrically, into your facility. Process hook-ups, functional testing and the punch-list are completed and resolved. Comprehensive training sessions are provided to your plant operators on the full system.