Engineering Management

TOYO's Engineering Work Flow

The schematic chart represents a typical Engineering Work Flow, for a chemical process plant project. Since a chemical plant consists of many components of various fields, numbers of expert will work together along with this work flow chart.

Process Engineers will start his work at the most upfront of work flow. Process simulation will be done to determine the process scheme and define operation condition suitable for the given feedstock and product specification and rate. Process Engineer will calculate the material and utility balance of all streams such as feedstock, intermediate product, bi-product, waste effluent, final product, and necessary utilities, and prepare both functional and spatial design requirement for the other engineers following his output. Mechanical engineers will prepare material requisition for each responsible equipment and purchase those items satisfying the performance defined by the Process engineer with cooperation of procurement engineer. Electrical Engineers, Instrument Engineers do the same exercise. In the meantime, these engineers provide information and requirement for spatial design. Piping Engineers are responsible for the layout of the equipment, structures, and buildings, satisfying the special and dimensional requirement delivered by other discipline engineers. They are also responsible to design piping with consideration to the operability and maintainability of the plant facility and also so responsible to purchase the necessary piping material. Civil Engineers will design the foundation of equipment and structures, piles, structures, buildings and roads, based on the layout of the plant and spatial and loading information provided by other discipline engineers. Electrical Engineers and Instrument Engineers are also responsible for the preparation of construction drawing such as cable and wiring layout based on the layout, and piping general arrangement drawing prepared by Piping Engineer.

Here, engineering and design works are categorized simply as functional, spatial or dimensional, but actually very complicated and various information are being exchanged in between the disciplines introduced above. Furthermore, the flow of information is not one way transfer, but sometimes backwards, a kind of feedback information need to be incorporated in the course of engineering. An enormous information flows during the project execution, and typically, more then 5000 document files of information are handled through the project.

Now IT tools and systems are available for dealing such large volume information and data, however the initial input need to rely on manual input. Wrong information will result in incorrect output and bring confusion to construction site, therefore, the quality of each individual engineer’s work is essential as a matter of course. Furthermore, the right communication on time, appropriate information flow forward and backward, internally and externally, are sometime more important for successful completion of a project.