An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

The situation is improving. A few years ago engineers would have faxed the data sheets to the
vendors, who would manually add their information and fax them back. Now they E-mail editable
electronic files back and forth. And more recently, some owner-operators are trying to
streamline the final handover from an EPC contractor by specifying data requirements. However,
configuration costs and the lead time required speak to the complexity of the issue.
What we need is a way for each participant’s software to be able to communicate complex
information to the other participants without having to know in advance things such as database
structure or format. If you have ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by
Douglas Adams, you will know exactly what we need—we need a Babel fish! In the book, if you
wanted to listen to Vogon poetry spoken in the original dialect you would use a Babel fish.
The Babel fish would listen to the Vogon speaking, and then rearrange the syntax and translate
all of the words on the fly. ISO 15926 acts like a Babel fish by acting as an interpreter
between two otherwise incompatible systems. Let’s compare the process of specifying and
purchasing an instrument in the previous example to doing the same thing with tools that
support ISO 15926 protocols. The initial data entry is the same.
• After design, enter the information into the project’s engineering design system (which
may be a database or spreadsheet).
However, thereafter tools written to support the ISO 15926 standard extract the relevant information
automatically.
• For quotation, a procurement officer will expose the Request for Quotation on his company’s
public (or secured) ISO 15926 interface and then send a link to the bidders.
• By connecting to the EPC contractor’s ISO 15926 interface, each vendor will pull in the relevant
information for each instrument. At this point, the vendor has a choice. He can have a
human sales engineer read the information and manually make decisions in the same manner
we use today. However, because it is in ISO 15926 format the instrument information
will be rich enough that analysis, decisions, and composition of a preliminary quotation will
be able to be done by a computer program. In this case, the sales engineer will only have
to review the quotation before submitting the bid to the EPC contractor.
• After selecting the winning bidder, the engineer will point his engineering design system to
the vendor’s ISO 15926 interface and pull in vendor-supplied information.
• Data turnover to the client will simply require exposing the plant information database on
the EPC contractor’s ISO 15926 interface.
INTRODUCTION
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