Data Management Case Study | Overview

An operator with nine small to medium gas storage plants kept mechanical integrity data in multiple silos. These had grown out of years of departmental nesting of databases. Because of this siloing of data, maintenance, operations, engineering, and other departments all had separate and distinct databases.

They sought to remedy this setup and create a centralized database. Ideally, one informed by data from all departments to create a true 360° view of their assets. Next, they sought the ability to keep the database evergreen and accurate despite limited resources at each site.

To achieve this, they leveraged Antea’s asset integrity management (AIM) software and data management as a service (DMS).

The first steps in the process were:

1. Understand where everything rested within the company’s current data management universe
2. Discover how data was being gathered and matriculated into larger datasets
3. Identify current shortfalls that present a challenge to the company’s data quality moving forward

Impact

With limited inspection personnel to begin with, and all of whom were working remotely, it was difficult for the company to manage the amount of data being generated from nine separate facilities. This included, but wasn’t limited to inspection data, test data, and maintenance data from each of the sites on a daily basis. The limited resources of the operator were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of asset data to process. Yet, due to regulatory requirements around inspections of pressure equipment, the process was necessary. It was also necessary to mitigate the risk of unplanned outages.  Thus, a solution was required imminently.

Solution

Due to the size of the company’s facilities, it was not economically feasible to have a resource on each site. Antea proposed that the client pay a fixed amount every year for DMS. That meant a specialized team would visit their sites on an interval commensurate to the amounts of data they were generating. Alternatively, the team would manage their data remotely in the cloud.

These services include the following:

• Data collection
  • Manage any updates to P&IDs
  • Import new inspection reports
  • Import new NDT data
  • Import any new isometric drawings that might have been created
• Training and support for users on site
• Any other data input into software (maintenance repairs, revisions, etc.)

Results

The data management case study revealed that as a result, the company experienced:

• Solved documentation issue with the government regulators
• Reduced overall document management costs
• Reduced time required to provide the documents update
• Reduced input errors
• Greater ROI from their software investment

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