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McLaren Software Debuts Enterprise Engineer for Assets

Posted on: Monday, 29 January 2007, 09:01 CST

McLaren Software, a leading independent software vendor specializing in applications for engineering process and content management, today announced what it says will be a "game-changing" technology for owner-operators and engineering prime contractors: Enterprise Engineer for Assets.

The new software serves as a controlled library of officially sanctioned engineering documents and drawings, including:

'As-built' drawings

Health and safety documents

Standard operating procedures

All other related asset content and correspondence

McLaren calls this document library an Asset Information Vault, and stresses that it helps companies standardize key engineering processes to increase operational efficiency and reduce cycle times, while also lowering non-compliance risks and decreasing lost production time. All of which results in a new way for companies to manage the supporting documentation for production assets like factories, refineries, oil rigs and power plants.

"During their lifespan, assets are renovated, reconfigured, extended or decommissioned to meet everything from changing business demands to external regulatory requirements," said Paul Muir, CEO of McLaren Software. "Enterprise Engineer for Assets centrally aggregates and manages all of the engineering content associated with these ever-changing facilities, providing engineering professionals with reliable, secure access to crucial project documents anytime, anywhere."

Enterprise Engineer for Assets works in real time with both newly created documents and documents in revision stages. This dramatically improves review, approval and handover processes and is especially important when there are multiple concurrent projects all working on the same content. Moreover, it allows users to track the relationships between the various documents for each individual project and the master versions of those same documents, providing a high level of support for concurrent engineering projects.

Enterprise Engineer for Assets is the only product of its kind which ensures that there is a single trusted source for asset content. This reduces rework and minimizes project delays. It also allows for more accurate decision making based on roles and assignments by using built-in processes that allow for officially sanctioned document updates. These updates can then be communicated in a controlled manner across all end users.

"Enterprise Engineer for Assets will allow our customers to bridge the gap between their engineering and maintenance teams by becoming the trusted source for all engineering content," said Muir, who goes on to point out that the product also allows for integrations with common maintenance applications like MRO's Maximo and SAP's Plant Maintenance

The Enterprise Engineer for Assets' system architecture is based on an inventory of physical sites, facilities, buildings, systems, and in some cases engineering disciplines -- all of which are segregated into a "Masters Area" and a "Released Area." All documentation placed in these areas seamlessly conforms to company and project standards, and can be easily and securely transferred for future reference.

Muir stresses that Enterprise Engineer for Assets confirms that as-built drawings and plant documentation are prepared and distributed in a controlled and centralized manner. "This simplifies the task of moving an asset from design to construction to operations and eventual de-commissioning," he says.

"It also allows owner-operators to standardize third party access to essential plant information, making it the industry's only fully auditable mechanism for sharing plant information with external vendors and contractors in a systematic way," continues Muir. The result, he says, is that a prescribed set of business rules within the system creates a compelling way to drive process automation, mitigate operational risk and diminish the compliance issues associated with critical asset documentation.

Enterprise Engineer for Assets will be generally available in second quarter 2007 and is designed to work with McLaren's flagship application suite, Enterprise Engineer™.

Enterprise Engineer supports the engineering process by providing a single point of control to manage the production and use of project content, including drawings, correspondence, procedures and specifications. It works on top of both the EMC Documentum and FileNet P8 platforms.

About McLaren Software

McLaren Software develops engineering-centric intellectual work management applications for the oil and gas, manufacturing, utilities, pharmaceutical, and engineering, design and construction sectors. McLaren helps organizations optimize their engineering design and asset change management processes to maximize the value in their engineering documents while mitigating the commercial risk associated with their use.

McLaren's Enterprise Engineer application suite supports the engineering process by providing a single point of control to manage the production and use of project content, including drawings, correspondence, procedures and specifications. Enterprise Engineer helps your business react to challenges of globalization and the aging workforce in increasingly regulated environments.

For more information, visit www.mclarensoftware.com.

Source: Business Wire

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