Ross McEllhiney | Project Manager | Louis Dreyfus Company
“The concept of virtual plant design and cloud-point scanning have had the biggest effects on the way we do business. It has been a huge change in our methodologies, the cost of our projects, and our ability to accomplish them.
“Regarding equipment, there hasn’t been any revolutionary changes recently, it’s more of an evolutionary process that’s happened over time. But the whole engineering side – doing virtual plants, desktop plant scanning, and design – has been revolutionary. It has changed the way we build plants.
“For example, we can pre-build a lot more stuff now than we could in the past. Things fit accurately. You can bring big pieces of equipment on site and install them. You can pre-build major sections of your plant and expect them to fit. You couldn’t do that in the past – it just wouldn’t fit, because the accuracy wasn’t there. Now, you can take 100,000 measurements today, as opposed to whatever you could measure with a tape measure. So, you’re going from 1,000 measurements on a plant and some old drawings to 100,000 or maybe 1 million measurements on a facility with a rate of accuracy that’s plus or minus a couple of millimeters. So this technology has radically changed the way we do things and how much it costs.
“It’s much less expensive to build things under a roof in some factory than it is to do it out in the weather, out at the facility. So we’re seeing a big shift toward building things at a higher level of completion on the factory floor at significantly reduced costs. The person standing in the field getting paid per diem, they are getting additional pay because they’re more talented or willing to travel to the location. And so that’s more expensive than the person who works at the shop.
“It’s also much safer to do pre-fabrication, because you’re not building things at heights or in bad conditions. The cost of pre-fabricated plants are about half the price of those built in the field, so there’s a huge cost savings. It’s kind of like modular housing. Modular housing is significantly less expensive than stick-building a home. It has its difficulties, but there is value in it if you can work out the downsides.
“Lastly, I think these technologies have become more affordable in the past 10 years, even more so in the past five years. augmented reality and virtual reality equipment costs have gone down radically, so you can afford to apply these tools to your operation.
The augmented reality tools are just a couple of years old. They’re making a difference in the way we do things. We can go to a brownfield job site today, hold up an iPad, and it knows where you are in the plant. From there, it will project your new equipment into the view that you see on the screen of the iPad. This stuff just didn’t exist three years ago. We couldn’t have done it. Contractors and engineers are just starting to learn about this technology. But there’s no question that, five years from now, if you don’t do this thing, you will go of the business. You just won’t be able to compete anymore.”
Reprinted from Grain Journal March/April 2020 Issue