Consultec

INTEGRATED PLANT DESIGN SYSTEM

Overview

Consultec is a Toronto based company, specializing in the design of large scale industrial projects for major corporations in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.

The Integrated Plant Design System (IPD), was developed to facilitate Consultec’s migration from 2D to 3D CAD design. Facilitating this migration required an overhaul not only of their engineering workflows, but required that their engineering team and communications structures be overhauled. The resulting system has become a key competitive advantage for Consultec. It has enabled Consultec to provide a higher quality product to their clients,
in a shorter time frame than previously thought possible. Additionally, IPD has firmly established Consultec as a "thought leader" in their industry.

Problem

At the time of undertaking this project, Consultec was working exclusively with 2D CAD software. This resulted in an extremely inefficient workflow, which required extensive design checking, and made design changes a drawn out and costly process. Internally, the 2D CAD system had also created ‘silos’ where specific teams worked on very specific elements of the design (e.g. structural, mechanical, etc.), with little collaboration.

Solution

At the outset of developing the Integrated Plant Design System (IPD), system, it was realized that in order for it to be effective, it needed to be a combination of technical and organizational evolution over Consultec’s workflow and team structure at the time. The IPD system leverages the 3D CAD model, and streamlined team structure to facilitate communication and collaboration between the designers, management and clients on a given project.

Results

IPD represented a massive change in both culture and design methodology for Consultec. As such, it required some time to gain traction—but once the system was fully adopted, it provided Consultec with a platform for dramatically reducing time and cost to finish projects, as well as establishing them as thought leaders in their industry.