Siemens’ Energy Sector offers products, services and solutions for power generation, transmission and distribution, and for oil and gas production, conversion and transport. There is also a growing focus on the renewable energy market, with emphasis on wind turbines, photovoltaic projects and solar-thermal power plants.
Siemens’ vision for its plant engineering framework required a change in the engineering execution process to make the tools more integrated, the data storage more centralised and the automated data transfer more process-oriented. The strategy for realising this vision of an integrated engineering environment is to implement
Intergraph’s, a Hexagon company, SmartPlant® Enterprise software.
In 2007, Siemens began using SmartPlant 3D, one of the solutions within the SmartPlant Enterprise family, for six plant projects. Siemens believed it would derive benefits not only in engineering and data management, but also in time and cost savings and quality improvements. The company expected savings in per-project hours among the disciplines – process, civil, electrical, mechanical and 3D modelling. Every one of these expectations was met successfully.
In evaluating SmartPlant 3D’s performance of modelling tasks, the company found the greatest reduction in project hours in modeling piping, 39 per cent time savings, and piping supports, 26 per cent savings.