USER STORY IN THE EDM/PDM WORLD : BNFL

USER STORIES

IN THE EDM/PDM WORLD :

BNFL

The issue of protecting the environment has never been more important. With the world's population on the increase it is essential that the utilisation of resources and raw materials for energy provision is optimised whilst minimising the detrimental effects of waste. No one is more aware of this than the nuclear industry in general and BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels plc) in particular. As one of only two companies in the world capable of providing the entire cycle of nuclear fuel services, BNFL and its U.S. subsidiary, BNFL Inc., is playing a major role in achieving the world-wide objective of safe, environment conscious processing of spent nuclear fuel, with its full service approach including nuclear waste management, decommissioning, engineering and nuclear materials handling company.

Recently, BNFL Inc. reached agreement on a huge 20 year clean-up operation worth up to $6.9 billion to remove radioactivity from millions of gallons of waste stored in 177 underground tanks at the U.S. government's Hanford site near Richland, Washington. The contract will result in the safe treatment of about 10 per cent of the waste (equal to 20 to 25 percent of the radioactivity) in Hanford's 54 million gallons of waste by 2018. The project is known as the Tank Waste Remediation Systems - Privatisation Project (TWRS-P).

Consistent with the company's investment in technology is its decision to implement Altris document management, workflow and configuration management software for the life-cycle management of documentation associated with TWRS-P Project. BNFL made the decision to invest in the Altris system, not only to maintain, control and distribute information but also to reap the business benefits associated with being able to reuse and reapply the knowledge that currently resides within the BNFL organisation. This project offers the opportunity for BNFL to formulate and implement an information management strategy for future adoption on a corporate wide basis.

The TWRS-P project is divided into five phases:

Phase I: Conceptual design and early project development
Phase II: Preliminary design and technology development including design optimisation of process systems and facility designs
Phase III: Detailed design engineering, procurement and construction of the TWRS-P facilities
Phase IV: Start-up and operation starting with cold start-up and proceeding through plan life
Phase V: Deactivation of the facilities after plant operation

In today's world, the acquisition, deployment, operation and eventual disposal of large capital assets such as those associated with the TWRS-P is increasingly complicated by a number of factors including:

The technical complexities of design, selection, construction, deployment, operations and support of products, systems and processes.
The business needs such as risk reduction, cost, time-to-deployment, operational performance, quality and the resultant ROI (Return on Investment).
The fundamental requirements for information to optimally fulfil business and technical requirements throughout the processes of planning, decision-making, work execution and control.

Information management has become a complex process due to the vast amounts of data and documents being created, maintained and used by multi-disciplinary teams, often located significant distances away from one another and in an environment where the only constant is that of change. BNFL realised that in order to deliver effectively and efficiently to its customers, actions needed to be taken at the onset of the project with regard to data and document management to assure information integrity, access and control, promulgation, timing and availability. Unlike many organisations that begin projects and then decide to implement systems in an attempt to complete them on time and within budget, BNFL had the foresight to predict the potential problems and pitfalls that could occur and made the decision to implement effective systems before rather than after the project commenced.

Implementation Approach
The implementation strategy for BNFL is to provide proper definitions of information and to guarantee its accessibility and integrity. Based on BNFL's needs to reduce the risk, cost and timescales associated with the TWRS-P project the first business processes that have been identified as candidates for the Altris system include Project and Business Management and Plant Design and Operational Management. The Knowledge Management group of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) based in Huntsville and one of Altris' largest systems integrator partners, is participating in the implementation design and installation of the Altris system as well as providing training.

To meet the overall objectives of the initial phases of the TWRS-P project, the implementation of the Altris information management solution was staged.

Stage 1 focused on establishing the infrastructure in order to:

Support the BNFL primary business drivers.
Manage all configuration management data and documents related to the TWRS-P project as well as general BNFL data that may relate to different BNFL operations.
Apply the discipline of configuration management to ensure integrity of all data contained in the system.
Provide users of the system full accessibility to their data structured to meet the functional requirements of the corporate implementation team and the TWRS-P project team.
Integrate, where possible, the various computerised tools to ensure that the data remains synchronised.
Investigate the potential automation of business processes using the workflow system.

Once the scope of work for Stage 1 had been agreed upon, site visits were conducted to familiarise the team with the business environment, the processes and the data to be managed.

The design specification and implementation plan was drawn up based on the data collected and various drafts were circulated for review and comment. Simultaneously, BNFL were supplied with guidelines for data collection and identification of appropriate and accurate sources of existing data.

150 user licenses of the software applications were installed on a server running Microsoft NT 4.0 and Oracle 7.3. The clients are all Windows 95 PC and Windows NT workstations. The applications installed include:

Altris Document Management
Altris CADConnect
Altris Pro CM
Staffware Workflow

The system is expected to be rolled out to approximately 500 users over the next few months.

Stage 2 is focusing on establishing the information management systems:

Implementation and roll-out of the document management processes.
Implementation and roll-out of the requirement management process.
Implementation and roll-out of the action tracking process.
Implementation and roll-out of the CAD interfaces.
Implementation of the configuration management interfaces to identified project processes.
Implementation of workflow to automate selected processes.

Stage 2 is currently in progress, with process documentation under development to reflect the use of the system. Existing document data will be imported into the system and the necessary relationships defined.

The roll-out will include user training tailored to the specific day to day tasks of individual users. The objective is to provide a good working knowledge of the specific elements of the system appropriate to any given user.

BNFL have chosen to implement an Altris solution because they know that a key element in meeting the demanding time schedule for the environmental clean up operation at the Hanford site is the company's ability to control and maintain all the documentation. This documentation, which will also be linked to the plant's physical and functional item structure, will continue to be generated throughout the whole life of the project.

Although BNFL's primary motivation in installing the Altris solution is to meet the key requirement of controlling and maintaining the complex documentation the project will generate, they expect to realise substantial, additional benefits. For example, the problems created by unlinked islands of information will be minimised. This will result in significant improvements in productivity, cost control and data integrity without compromising compliance with the standards laid down by the nuclear regulatory agencies.

Jodi Mahan, Records and Information Management Specialist, BNFL said, ' We looked at several vendors before making the decision to implement Altris. The choice of the Altris solution as the BNFL Inc. Corporate standard was based on their ability to provide a single vendor solution that met almost 88% of our requirements. We also knew that implementing a system as early as possible in the TWRS-P project lifecycle would be the best way to avoid enormous cost and lengthy implementation schedules that would be incurred by waiting until later phases.'

Stage 1 is complete and has been accepted by BNFL. Stage 2 is currently in progress.

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