California based Pacific Gas and Electric has extended its intelligent substation design strategy, based on Bentley Substation, to its external design contractors. Through ProjectWise, contractors can securely access PG&E’s substation designs and collaborate with in-house engineers working “live” in PG&E’s environment.
PG&E Substation Engineering Services successfully deployed Bentley Substation and ProjectWise to approximately 80 internal design employees in 2011 and 2012. This decreased errors on drawings, reduction of the amount of construction rework in the field, and a drop in the average design hours per drawing by 50%.
In order to continue to successfully manage substation work, PG&E needed to identify a process that allowed external contractors to access and collaborate on PG&E’s 3D substation drawings. Approximately 60 percent of PG&E’s projects are contracted out to major engineering firms in the United States including GE, WorleyParsons, Schneider Engineering, Sargent & Lundy, Burns & McDonnell, Dashiell, SEL, HDR, ABB, TRC, Mesa Engineering, BPE, Ampirical Solutions, and Black & Veatch.
PG&E also wanted its contractors to use Bentley Substation and ProjectWise to realize efficiency gains and benefits similar to those that it had been realizing internally. PG&E sought to maintain strict control over a single, centralized storage database where all PG&E drawings would be stored and accessed by both the contractors and internal designers.
PG&E Substation Engineering Services worked with the PG&E IT organization and Bentley to evaluate a number of options that would enable effective, efficient, and secure project collaboration with contractors. After much analysis and a proof of concept, the use of Bentley Substation and ProjectWise via a secure Citrix connection was the solution chosen. This implementation allowed PG&E to eliminate the need to have a drawing administrator while enabling control over the drawings and projects that contractors are able to see and change. Contractors can securely log into ProjectWise, then check out and work on PG&E’s drawings using Bentley Substation. The engineering contractor collaboration solution allows for simultaneous design by multiple contractors, as well as instantaneous error-checking between engineering firms.
While being efficient has become more and more important for all projects, it is absolutely essential on larger transmission projects, since PG&E sends these out for competitive bidding as part of the FERC Order 1000 compliance.
Today, efficiencies of up to 35 percent are being captured on each capital order that is contracted for design. PG&E’s contractors are expected to decrease their average design hours per drawing from 24 to 16, thus reducing the costs of project delivery. This goal is expected to yield savings of up to USD 5 million per year. Cost savings are due to the improvements in secure document control, consolidation of various data sources, streamlined design cycle, and reduction of design errors and construction rework. In addition to significantly reducing design hours and cost, the consolidated database as a sole, secure method of document control has decreased the risk of having inaccurate or duplicate substation records and has helped PG&E better comply with stringent regulatory record keeping requirements.
Josue Martinez, Senior Project Engineer at PG&E stated, “Over the last several years, PG&E has enjoyed a very fruitful partnership with Bentley. With the completion of our Engineering Contractor Collaboration Solution, we are proud to bring our external contractors on board and include them in this partnership. As a result, we are collaborating more effectively, efficiently, securely, and confidently with our contractors in order to achieve greater success in overall project delivery.”
