Honeywell Process Solutions' (HPS) new project execution approach helps prevent cost and time overruns by “taking automation off the critical path," according to Brendan Sheehan, projects and automation system business global marketing director, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS). The company unveiled its new approach to project management, the LEAP methodology, at the at the Honeywell Users Group (HUG) Americas Symposium in San Antonio, Texas, last month. LEAP stands for “lean execution for automation projects."
LEAP combines HPS proprietary hardware and software, virtualization and cloud engineering to give users greater scheduling flexibility while reducing risk and total automation costs by up to 30%. Multiple industries can benefit from an estimated 80% reduction in costs related to unnecessary rework. These features can also help reduce avoidable schedule delays by up to 90%.
LEAP represents a major departure from the way plants are typically designed and built by using parallel workflows to keep automation systems off critical implementation paths. LEAP creates separate streams of work for the physical and functional aspects of project design. This approach allows project engineering to take place from anywhere in the world and removes workflow dependencies to allow core project tasks to start much earlier in the process. It also minimizes the cost and volume of rework typically associated with automation projects.
Universal I/O allows engineers to specify standard cabinets solely on the basis of estimated total I/O counts, without predetermining how many of what kinds of I/O. Cabinets can be built, shipped and installed before the control system is designed and are esentially immune to change orders, since wiring can be landed before the I/O is configured.
Virtualization allows the entire control system to be engineered and configured on Honeywell servers before any hardware is on site. After it's tested, the system and its databases can be downloaded to the plant.
Cloud engineering allows engineers around the world to work on the project from wherever they're located. “We bring the work to the engineers; we don't have to send the engineers to the staging area," said Jason Urso, HPS chief technology officer. This means specialized expertise becomes readily available.
The conventional approach of waiting for the instrumentation freeze to build and install the physical equipment, build displays and test the system, and then ship to the site can take two to three years. “Now you can engineer sooner, without the physical equipment — no development system, no update," said Urso. “Ship standard cabinets, ship the servers at the end of the project, and load them from the cloud."
