BAYER SAS France has two sites in France in addition to its headquarters in Lyon, mainly for the production and packaging of crop protection products. As a company that is over 150 years old, BAYER is one of the world‘s best-known brands in agriculture and healthcare.
The project managers of the technical services, who are responsible for the planning, maintenance and engineering of the roduction equipment at Villefranche, the larger of the two production sites, previously archived their documents in different folders. This made it difficult to maintain data and documents for engineering projects, from the supply networks and automation to the quipment and maintenance of the plant. In addition, device management and tracking were very timeconsuming, as the P&IDs, which were created with a simple graphical CAD tool, had no logical link to the equipment and instrumentation database.
Central
„We had long recognized the need to bring all our documents and technical data together into a single storage location. At a
pharmaceutical-chemical trade fair in Lyon in 2016, we finally found a system in AUCOTEC‘s Engineering Base (EB) that provides this option,“ reports Jérôme Druet, head of the technical office at BAYER in Villefranche. Bayer attaches great importance to all safety-relevant aspects of its plants. They have integrated the normative data, the certificates of conformity and the organisation of the networks into Engineering Base as part of the modernization and device classification in the ATEX area. „With the cooperative platform, we can now edit and process the documentation of the plant centrally throughout its entire
life cycle, from the initial concept to dismantling,“ says the department head.
All technical services in Villefranche now work in a joint EB master project, the „master site“, with reference to the production site, and thus have access to all current technical data and documents. The administrators can define additional parallel projects at any time, e.g. for a plant conversion. The project can then be exported, simultaneously edited by the engineering team and easily integrated back into the master site after acceptance.
Updated in real time
„The fact that all users work on EB‘s central data model gives us the guarantee that they all have the same version. And with its simplified search functions, EB also saves time,“ emphasizes Druet. He also praises the fact that the equipment and instrumentation are automatically updated in real time. And EB also shows its flexibility in the free definition of user groups and their rights.
There is growing interest
Interest in EB has grown steadily, including at the BAYER site in Marle. In the medium term, EB is to be networked with SAP.
„This is what we would expect, and with EB the coupling can be achieved very effectively,“ says Jérôme Druet, who will continue
to rely on AUCOTEC‘s support and the further development of EB in the future.
