Re: The Question: Talking Heads - Offshoring

From: <Geoff>
Date: Thu Sep 29 2005 - 02:28:00 EDT


Paul,

Nothing is that easy. Australia is a vast continent with two major cities in Sydney and Melbourne. The engineering centres for petrochem are now in Brisbane and Perth. Many overseas companies like Fluor Daniel and Kvaerner have brought their standards and traditions with them. Others have used local initiatives and gone their own way.

You will find pockets of these products scattered around the country. Some doing 2D and some 3D. Some are using Autocad Light or old editons of the Autocad software to get by.

When a contract insists on a package a design house or consultant might start from scratch, hiring guns as necessary with no thought of just getting a job done. Some consultants might develop an application using a high end product, the job ends, the guys leave and it disappears. The MBA s who are left dont know what to do with it.

Some jobs are set up as Alliances or joint ventures. The big guy gets to use his preferred software. Again the MBAs just want the job done and they think all the high end stuff is IT toys for the boys. They dont see it as a production tool.

Remember we are just a huge mine with a few sheep and cattle meandering through the wheat fields. Hot spots include the car companies who are pretty smick when it comes to design. Also Off shore with Woodside, mining with BHP Billington, submarines, frigates in the defence industry etc etc.

Most engineering is roads, rail and water pipelines. The odd mine gets built generally by an overseas mob who have their own standards and procedures.

PDS and ACAD used for everything. Add on packages here and there for piping. FEA in the hands of specialised houses. Integration of packages hardly seen.

I fight a losing battle trying to get them to even use attributes to develop lists off P&IDs or use an isometric generating package etc etc.

Mining and water and waste water are designed by every tom, dick and harry. Materials used are not in the databases.

Australia has a fortress Australia policy. We have our own standards and dimensions for ductile iron , plastic, GRP and even steel pipes (would you believe Ozzie 6" pipe is a different dimension to nominal bore pipe?)so the world cant export here. Mind you its hard exporting from here too but we get by.

Lots of use made of dairy pipe in stainless steel, spiral wound pipe in CS and SS and the story goes on and on. No use having USA material databases.

The programs I use for stress analysis and waterhammer analysis allows me to develop my own dimensional databases.

You guys in North America need to get out more. There is a great world out here. We dont use feet and inches, we followed the Napolean doctrine years ago and adopted SI units.

I had a guy here trying to flog me Sch40 and 80 PVC pipe. When I told him it was non standard and could not be joined to anything here, he had a fit.I told him his manual was old fashioned, archaic and wouldnt impress anyone here. This is typical of the USA thoughts of the world. We have moved on. We dont buy a fancy software package, making do with what we have.

Infilco Degremont came here to set up from the USA. I told the President at the time that I could by thickeners and other mining equipment from twenty companies at 25% of what he wanted to sell me one for. He told his people not to bother coming.

Gold plants are designed for 3 year life to get the income stream. Then the owner spends the money on what broke.

I once heard of a natural gas pipeline using car exhaust tube, laid across the desert to the LPG plant. It met the code, AS 2885, and would last the five years or so required. No corrosion where the desert hadnt seen rain in 50 years. If it went bang, no one around for fifty miles.

Imagine a continent the size of North America with total population of 20million. 95% of them in six cities. Thats lots of space in between. A bit of land isnt called a farm unless it 100,000sq miles!

Paul Bowers <pbowers@pipingdesign.com> wrote: So that means Cadpipe, Cadworx, Autoplant, et al (low end) on ACAD and PDS on Intergraph (high end)?

I'm curious.

Paul

Geoff Stone DD&D Australia wrote:
> Paul,
>
> Its either Autocad or Intergraph in the piping game down here.
>
> Geoff
>
> Paul Bowers <pbowers@pipingdesign.com> wrote:
> Geoff Stone DD&D Australia wrote:
>
>
>>The niche market acitivities are the way to go as even the bbig boys dont
trust the overseas mobs to do the hard "black art" stuff. Stuff ups normally occur during construction , debottle necking, maintenance or revamps. Thats where most work comes from here.
>
>
> Since technical drawings tend to still be the interim end result of
> engineering projects, do you have to work with and adapt to a variety of
> CAD/PLM software?



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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Thu Sep 29 02:28:00 2005

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