Royal Dutch Shell selects Polarion for requirements managements use on global capital projects
Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced (link) that Royal Dutch Shell had selected Polarion® Requirements™ software as the foundation for their transition to a Digital Lifecycle in Shell’s global Capital Projects ecosystem. The Siemens / Shell Partnership is a significant first step to creating a better data model for the petroleum industry to collaborate with their EPC and Equipment Supply Partners on Capital Projects.
Today many of the specification, design, and regulatory requirements are typically buried in unstructured documents stored in a document repository or multiple repositories. In most cases, the information is hard to find, and there is no traceability among the information elements (e.g., regulatory or compliance requirements) embedded in the documents.
The advantage of decomposing these typically lengthy and complex documents into sets of requirements in a tool is that the documents’ information elements can be managed in a logical and structured manner using formal linked relationships. The linking is critical to creating and managing high-quality, robust, and consistent requirements as it facilitates analysis of the impact of a change to a design or specification. This analysis can be carried out to determine the actual cost of the change before it is accepted. This analysis is complicated to perform if documents are not related at the correct level of detail (as is the case in document management systems) as project members do not have a holistic view of how a proposed change cascades across the project.
Over the last 30 years, nuclear power plants (NPPs), aerospace and defense, and other heavy capital industries have seen significant benefits from taking a “system of systems” approach to managing their data. Doing so allows users to view a physical asset such as an NPP or aircraft as an integrated collection of multiple sub-systems made up of mechanical, electrical, chemical, software, and human elements. Each of the sub-systems meets a set of well-defined requirements describing system performance and capturing what is necessary to meet regulatory mandates, safety standards, and governmental statutes.
Polarion provides the ability to atomize or decompose documents and break them down into the data that Shell needs for business microflows to connect specific requirements to assets. Doing so ensures specifications digitally guide and improve the overall quality of the project design, construction, and commissioning processes.
These capabilities are now fully integrated with the product lifecycle management suite (Teamcenter), providing complete enterprise data management. It is home to a myriad of processes that are no longer manual but have been fully digitalized (i.e., change management, issues management, submittals tracking, etc.).
Siemens has brought together Polarion and Teamcenter that drive a modern, scalable architecture that starts with requirements management as a data-driven solution and carries energy organizations forward with digitalized business processes from design to operations – a Digital Lifecycle for Energy!
