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Fluor Corporation: www.fluor.com
10/22/01: Fluor Corporation reaches 100 PlantWise License Milestone
Fluor Corporation
Cutting Front-End Plant Design in Half!
Fluor Corporation, one of the world's largest engineering & construction firms, chose Design Power, Inc. to re-engineer significant parts of its front-end engineering and design process for plant design. Design Power captured plant concept knowledge using its proprietary Design++® technology into an automated work process solution that was later named OptimEyes by Fluor. It has been distributed to Fluor's offices world-wide as a reference solution and provides significant advantages like plant design time cut in half.
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In the early 90's Fluor Corporation realized that to stay competitive it had to drastically improve engineering productivity. A program that called for a 50% reduction in overall plant design execution time was initiated. Early in this program, Fluor determined that the technology and methods developed by Design Power could make this goal attainable.
Protecting Knowledge Assets
At a conference in Amsterdam, Bertrand Van Ee, General Manager, Fluor's Haarlem office, argued strongly: "By relying heavily on outsourcing, developed countries are on a course of collective suicide." This is the principal reason why Fluor invests in knowledge and retention of that knowledge.
Lower cost labor in developing countries may be attractive in the short term, but the knowledge transfer that takes place in the process quickly renders the transferor obsolete. The retention of knowledge intensive work is paramount. This is where Design Power's technology becomes important.
By enabling Fluor to capture labor intensive knowledge into Design Power's work process automation solution, FDI can now competitively offer knowledge without transferring its mission critical ways of operating to potential competitors.
OptimEyesSM
Front end engineering and design precedes the plant investment decision. The design engineering proposal is based on it. At this stage plant concepts and design principles are decided upon and the investment cost is estimated. At this stage the largest mistakes are often made. These may wipe out the profitability of the construction project. Therefore, Fluor commissioned Design Power to create a solution that significantly helps in finding the optimal plant layout. The implemented solution greatly improves the speed of conceptual plant modeling and the accuracy of the cost estimate for a plant.
Fluor named the solution created by Design Power, OptimEyes. The name highlights its optimization and visualization qualities. It is fully integrated with Fluor's other work processes. Fluor users love it!
Global Endorsements
"We have 35 licenses in 11 Fluor office world-wide and we used it on over 30 projects in the first year."
According to Frank Schultz of the Irvine California office
The layout finally chosen worked out to be the option which at first sight would not have been selected without OptimEyes,"
Bert Kesseler, Harlem, the Netherlands
"We really stretched the system. We delivered the model in seven weeks with all the take-offs, and we probably reduced the man hours by about two thirds to produce the front end estimate."
Jerry Key, Fluor, Houston.
"It was the absolutely most successful project and it led to a win in the design competition for this client. IT was extremely successful. We produced a number of layout options in a very short time and quickly produced the MTO's from the optimized plot."
Mike Gibson, Camberly, UK.
"We had two weeks of time for our presentation which gave us only one week modeling time and one week for the AVI. This was a total success, we had the whole plant modeled in time. Based on our efforts we were awarded a significant FEED package."
Heinz Brehm, Irvine.
