DHAHRAN: Saudi Aramco achieved a major milestone with the recent launch of the high-tech Engineering Solutions Center (ESC).
The center initiates a new era of integrated solutions, allowing real-time data to stream from the plant to engineers and other experts using the latest visualization technologies.
The center is a collaborative environment that provides an integrated information center for multi-disciplined engineering teams from engineering services and operating facilities.
Experts from different engineering disciplines can work together across geographical borders and time zones on the same information. The center enables assistance to operating facilities, maximizing their performance, efficiency and reliability.
The center is located in the core area of Aramco headquarters in Dhahran.
Isam A. Al-Bayat, vice president of Engineering Services; Omar S. Bazuhair, chief engineer; Saleh A. Zaid, department manager; and engineering services managers attended the opening ceremony that was followed by the center’s introduction and a demonstration of its abilities. The center uses a variety of engineering tools to enhance collaboration. Three-D virtualization has already been applied in some facilities, which allows visual fly-throughs of any plant, 360-degree rotation of any piece of equipment or piping and zooming in or out to view individual pieces of equipment or the entire facility.
The center is equipped with the latest communication technologies, allowing experts from Saudi Aramco’s engineering services to communicate with their customers regardless of their location. The communications technologies provide instant messaging, audio and video conferencing and desktop-application sharing. That improves the experts’ productivity, allowing them to serve several customers at the same time.
The center extracts its data from the engineering databases and shortens the time engineers usually spend trying to extract data. It also fosters collaboration among engineers from multiple disciplines.
The center is a prototype of a more advanced center that will be built at North Park in Dhahran. The new center will be larger with the capability to integrate with more plant data and engineering application packages.
