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Alaska Petroleum Contractors stretching software envelope Need to compete with outside contractors leads to innovative manipulation of piping drawing software Randy Brutsche PNA Technical Editor
Alaska Petroleum Contractors, a subsidiary of Natchiq Inc. and Arctic Slope Regional Corp., is on a quest to become and remain competitive with oil and gas industry contractors in the Lower 48. APC’s core business is module fabrication and a large portion of that is pipe spools. To win bids, APC realized it had to become quicker in its pipe spool fabrication.
One phase of that effort resulted in upgrading its fabrication facility to semi-automatic welders and state-of-the-art plasma arc cutters and training its welding personnel to use them. Another phase resulted in purchasing software to generate in-house spool drawings from the client’s isometric drawings.
Going digital with spool drawings Gary Buchanan, APC’s operations manager, said that in 1996 APC looked at several software programs to speed up the process of generating spool drawings from an engineering firm’s isometric drawing. “We used to convert iso drawings to a series of spool drawings by hand,” said Buchanan. “Three or four years ago, we selected Iso Express.”
Iso Express is a spool drawing program developed by John Young’s Acorn Pipe Systems Inc. out of Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada.
Young, a spooling drafter himself, has been developing Iso Express since 1987. He said that in response to customer feedback, he will likely always be refining the software. He is currently working on modifying the data fields of the software to meet the needs of other piping industry fabricators, such as pulp mills.
Stretching the envelope Shortly after purchasing Iso Express, APC determined that it would like to track individual aspects of the manufacturing process by scanning a bar code into the program’s database. APC asked Young about expanding the bar coding capabilities of Iso Express.
Buchanan said, “In response to our client engineering company calling with a design change and asking us where a specific spool was in the manufacturing process, we wanted to be able to determine where a specific spool was at a moment’s notice. We decided that we wanted to track the spools through the facility, from ordering raw material, to welder identification, to shipping the finished spool, by way of a bar code.”
Within a few months, Young had developed an add-on program to do just that.
As a direct result of APC’s request, Iso Express now has 13 different fields that can accept data from a hand-held scanner. The benefit to APC was immediate. Although APC has been using the bar code capability for a few years, it was released as a function of Iso Express only recently.
APC is now using version 7.66 of Iso Express and is evaluating version 7.74.
Customizable fields and data exporting The 13 data fields have customizable headers, as a text file, that the client can change to meet its data tracking needs. APC scans the bar code of a pipe spool as it leaves each fabrication process beginning with engineering hold, then moving through materials, cutting, sub fit, final fit, weld out, fabrication complete, post weld heat treat, quality control, hydro testing, painting, other service and ending with shipping. APC uses the “other service” field as a miscellaneous or wild-card field for the odd or infrequent process or when APC has to send a spool out for a special process.
As Iso Express is used to capture the fabrication process data, it builds and updates the job database text files that can be exported into spreadsheet programs. APC can use either Iso Express or another program to generate reports to show progress for the job, the day, the week or the year.
Value to the client Buchanan said that APC’s client engineering companies frequently call to order a design change to a spool. Ideally, the change order comes into APC before the spool has entered APC’s fabrication process. Sometimes the spool is on the shop floor, mid-process, and sometimes it has already been shipped to the module erection site at the port of Anchorage.
Buchanan said that before converting to the Iso Express software, such a change would require days of effort to determine where a specific spool was in the fabrication process. For example, APC fabricated some 2,600 pipe spools for the Alpine project and the current estimate for the Northstar project is 2,400. “Now we can tell them, in a matter of minutes, where that spool is and whether we can make the change or if they’ll have to make the change down at the dock.”
Marty Thurber, APC’s project engineer, is the master mind behind APC’s Iso Express effort. He said that in addition to Iso Express, he has run other spooling software based on computer aided drafting type programs. “They’re fine for doing isometric drawings,” he said, “but for spooling, you can’t out run this one, it’s just so fast.”
He said that before Iso Express, when spoolers had to generate the spool drawings by hand, the best that could be hoped for was about 10 to 15 drawings per day. Now with Iso Express, the average is up to about 20 per day, but he has seen as many as 80 to 90 spool drawings produced in a day.
Thurber also said that the bill of materials generated by the other spooling programs often needs to be edited. He said that if he needs to modify the description of a specific material, because of a change to an engineering specification, he goes to the database of Iso Express and makes the change in one place. From then on, all drawings or bills of materials have the current information.
Thurber also pointed out the capability of using Iso Express to track material inventory. He generates a bulk materials list and notifies the purchasing agents of APC. They in turn update the list as material is received. Thurber can then issue specific pipe spool drawings to the shop floor based on material received.
Buchanan said APC also uses Iso Express’s tracking capability to control the work on the shop floor. Depending on many factors, he sometimes feeds a few large diameter pipe spools to the floor, feeds many small diameter ones or some combination of both. Without the tracking capability of Iso Express, such freedom of choice would be nearly impossible due to the problems it would create just to keep track of spool status.
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