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DIGITAL PLANT Conference 2010

Delivering the Only Conference for
Real Plant Lifecycle Practices – Increasing Plant Productivity and Decreasing Risk Through Technology

DIGITAL PLANT 2010 is the premiere plant lifecycle conference for the chemicals, power, oil and gas, offshore, and pharmaceuticals industries. DIGITAL PLANT features a content-rich program, addressing the critical factors for plant operations, maintenance, design, and construction. The presentations, prepared and delivered by the world-leading practitioners from owner, engineering-procurement-construction, and equipment supplier companies, feature the following session themes:

Thought Leadership

The DIGITAL PLANT conference has always provided the strategies and directions for the next generation. This is entirely appropriate given the tectonic changes that we are seeing in the plant industries over these past five years. Consider the challenges for which solutions are demanded:

• The global markets requiring ever more effective plant operations and maintenance, and information is becoming one of the key platforms for advances in safety and effectiveness
• Mega-projects now in the $10B + range and demanding more and more sophisticated processes
• Projects being performed through numerous partners, and the science of project management has been escalated to new heights
• Commodity/material prices continue to rise, and designs need to consider source price variability as a major factor.
• Procurement is being performed on a worldwide basis, and achieving standards on global programs introduces a whole new set of variables.

Pulse of Technology

The plant industry has always benefited from a rich set of technology solutions for the purpose of designing, constructing, and operating facilities. DIGITAL PLANT has been a unique venue for comparing, learning of new developments, and understanding the overall direction of the plant technology world.

We have almost come to expect the significant advancements made by the major design vendors in delivering functions. The ability to handle rules-based work processes as well as the investments in interoperability brings a new set of parameters to the limits of “what is possible”. Vendors are investing in applications that make use of their underlying technologies, and are also applying these to other mission-critical processes such as construction management, plant commissioning, and more efficient delivery to the plant operations activities.

Best Practices

The best practices compendium draws from virtually every phase of a facility. Some of the best practices that are featured include

• Project Evaluation and Planning: For an owner, this is one of the core processes for achieving business competitiveness. The Front End Loading (FEL) process is now approaching twenty-years in application and experience. This stage gated processes are well documented and, more importantly, some of the leading owner companies in the global market have achieved significant refinements in its use. Best practices in the project planning process are key for owners in the chemicals, power, petrochemical, offshore and pharmaceuticals industries.

• Model-Centric Design Processes: We have benefited greatly from the expansion of model-centric design systems. The ability to establish both spatial and logical representations of “virtual plants” is reaching the stage of maturity. What is still growing is the best practices related to the creation and maintenance of the design models throughout the project processes.

• Project Information Turnover: No process may have benefited more from modern tools than the delivery of information from design to operations. Historically, this activity could take as much as a year, and be highly ineffective. Best practices have transformed this to a natural migration from one plant phase to another. This is an area where best practices can have a dramatic impact on cost, schedule, AND quality.

• Global Collaboration: The need to bring together personnel for mega-projects, frequently located across the world, is quite possibly the most challenging set of business processes we have undertaken as an industry. Companies, doing it properly, are achieving a competitive advantage, literally transforming business processes that have been in place for decades around collaboration

DIGITAL PLANT Features

• Individual moderated tours of vendors, providing a unique perspective on what suppliers are delivering today and tomorrow
• Ample breakout sessions for networking and reviewing offerings from each conference partner
• Co-location with Plant Asset Scanning Summit (PASS), affording significant insight to the evolving sciences related to data capture through terrestrial laser and scanning systems
• Located in the financial and entertainment center of Houston, the city provides a wide array of entertainment options within walking distance to supplement the evening events.