Metadata capture and indexing

Digitizing your plant

Customer Benefits

Efficiently find and retrieve existing project documentation.

Our Services

Automated and semi-automated data scraping and validation, system integration, and customization.

The Client

Our customer is the largest drilling company in the Middle East, managing multiple plant assets and process facilities.

Project Challenge

Our client had a large quantity of historical project documentation stored in folder structures on file servers, making it inefficient to find and access. SmartPlant Foundation was selected and implemented as the standard repository for all plant documentation. The challenges for this project were to capture the metadata, prepare the indexes and object relationships from the historical project documentation, and load them into SPF.

Other technical challenges included handwritten and poor-quality scanned documents, duplicates and inconsistencies in documents and tag numbering, and misalignment between project documents and technical data already contained within SPF.

Our Solution

TecSurge applied a semi-automated approach to this project, using a combination of in-house developed custom automation tools and a team of industry-experienced document controllers to capture document metadata and data relationships.

We validated document and drawing metadata such as title, revision history, and contract/project identifiers and constructed a data relationship model linking documents to related tags, documents, purchase orders, vendors, and other objects.

Our automation consists of an integrated data scraping, data entry, review, validation, and export application to facilitate the distribution and control of the project work between team members. The software extracts tag and document number references from machine-readable documents based on regular expression patterns, making the process of capturing information much more efficient than manual data entry. The program uses file-based hashing, rapidly identifying duplicates and saving time and effort.

Once data has been captured and validated, it is exported in file formats suitable for import into SmartPlant Foundation before conducting the comprehensive acceptance tests in close collaboration with the client’s site personnel.

Facts and Figures

• Capture metadata and build an object relationship data model from legacy and existing project documents and drawings.
• Validate and upload indexed content into SmartPlant Foundation.
• Information Management project covering data management and system integration.
• Approximately 521,019 files and 483,827 documents indexed across twelve plants in a multiyear engagement.

If you want to increase your return on investment in metadata capture and indexing, please contact us today to discuss your options.