Two Australian resource companies have been recognised at an international infrastructure awards program for using innovative software solutions to help build their projects.
QGC and Ausenco were both winners last night after taking home the gold in an award ceremony in London.
Ausenco won the Innovation in Mining and Metals award for its Constancia project in Peru, while QGC was awarded the Advancing Asset Lifecycle Information Management award for work on its $20 billion LNG plant on Curtis Island, Queensland.
Bentley’s Be Inspired Awards have been held since 2004 and aim to showcase excellence and innovation in the design, construction, and operations of architecture and engineering infrastructure projects around the world.
Bentley’s COO Malcolm Walter called the awards program, “the academy awards of infrastructure”, and more than 500 people turned out to last night’s presentation dinner,
Ausenco’s Senior Design Systems Engineer Anuj Anand told Australian Mining he was pleased at the win.
“It feels great to be part of something so innovative and it’s thanks to having a great team and a great support network that has made the project such a success,” Anand said.
The Constancia Project, located in Chumbivilcas, Peru, saw Ausenco provide engineering, procurement, construction, and management services to design, construct, and commission a 25 Mt/y concentrator and associated infrastructure for the high-altitude project.
One of the challenges of the project was that Ausenco managed data across people, disciplines, languages, and multiple locations. Collaboration among Brisbane, Toronto, and Peru to align existing systems, expertise, and processes was critical to the successful delivery of the project.
Using ProjectWise with AutoPLANT, Ausenco was able to bring these disparate engineering teams together, reducing errors and increasing data integrity throughout the lifecycle of the project.
Ausenco then worked to add its own system that allowed the company to track data changes across the project to create a single source of ‘truth’ data.
Anand said this cut the amount of time it took to finish the project, as work sequences weren’t being double-handled as they were visible throughout the design lifecycle.
Work sharing across the three geographical location would have been ‘extremely tedious’ without the software, Anand said.
Commissioning of the project is scheduled to be completed on time in Q1 2015, Anand said.
Meanwhile, QGC won for the way it innovatively managed the hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment it took to build the LNG plant on Curtis Island in Gladstone.
QGC needed to track 700,000 pieces of equipment from 2,000 wells, 22 plant facilities, four water treatment plants, pipelines, as well as equipment on the island.
Working with Bentley, QGC developed an engineering data warehouse leveraging eB Information Manager.
QGC is now able to convert design data into a common i-model format that can be easily accessed by all on site.
The company said the challenge was to recreate physical facilities in a digital world.
All equipment is tagged and its data stored and accessible to operators on the field and across the various project sites.
QGC said this has allowed its operations team to access all the information they need to build the plant from one data portal, reducing risk, cutting time and saving the company money.
In presenting the award, Walter said QGC’s engineering data warehouse helps to improve collaboration, provides transparency of data ownership and tracks traceability changes across the entire project.