Collaboration for equipment & facility designers
If “context is everything”, what is contextual design for equipment & facility designers?
According to the Interaction Design Foundation “Contextual design is a reflection of the idea that no design exists in a vacuum. That one technology or perhaps system will interact in a much larger context“. This is a guiding principle in design no matter the industry, however, this is especially true when you look at the 25 to 50-year life of an industrial plant or facility.
Facility design information is often created and managed by domain-specific teams. These teams, and the information they produce, are frequently siloed from the equipment designers who are tasked with increasing production capacity through modernizations & retrofits of existing systems/equipment. And, as time marches on, the owner/operator continues to build a view of their plant or facility devoid of the facility information that could be used to lower infrastructure costs and reduce startup time for new production equipment.
Today, many organizations have a rich view of the “field or floor” – the systems and equipment contained in the facility – but haven’t connected that data to the building infrastructure information to fully enable teams to design in context. With Capital Asset Lifecycle Management (CALM), you’re able to do just that by consolidating and unifying various forms of information into an enterprise collaboration platform in the form of a “digital twin”. This capability allows you to manage released data from popular tools such as Autodesk Revit & Bentley MicroStation and connect it to other forms of CAD data such as the equipment designs produced in Siemens NX, Siemens NX Line Designer or Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS.
Want to learn more about CALM? Read additional CALM blogs, or watch our most recent video about collaboration!
