Weber Engineering GmbH & Co. KG. forms part of the Weber Group with around 2000 employees. The company, which is over 100 years old and now in its fourth generation, is the market leader in industrial piping construction for the process industry. In addition to services, energy services, scaffolding and more, the group also offers engineering for the (petro)chemical and oil and gas industries. Weber Engineering employs around 100 experts.
One of them is Dieter Dimmers, for many years site manager in Rheinberg, where he and his team maintain a major chemical plant operator whose products are world leaders. When the complete plant documentation was transferred to AUCOTEC‘s database-based cooperation platform Engineering Base (EB) a few years ago, he quickly recognized its potential: system discontinuities, interfaces and time-consuming „passing“ of data through the disciplines were eliminated.
„There is no alternative to a common database“
In 2019, Weber Engineering received an order for a modern greenfield project: an environmentally friendly power plant fired by waste wood. „We agreed with the client to use EB for this right from the start,“ Dimmers reports. Whether substations, protective devices, control system components, safety switches, motors, cables or measuring transducers: „If you have your central catalog in EB up to date, creating the documentation is easy,“ he says, emphasizing that there is no alternative for him to ensure that everyone involved has access to the same database. This is the only way to prevent duplicate entries, transmissions and the associated errors. And since there is no need to pass on information to neighboring disciplines, nothing can be forgotten. This creates significantly more reliable data. Thanks to initial experience, the team found it quite easy to work with EB, especially the colleagues without prior tool imprinting. „Users of a new system should be open to it. EB is different, promotes more efficient and digital processes, and that requires rethinking,“ says the site manager.
„Complete success“ times two
For the new building project, he speaks of a complete success. A second „Woodpower“ power plant is currently being planned and built by Weber Engineering to make the Rheinberg industrial site independent of coal and to reduce its CO2 footprint. According to Dimmers, the close resemblance to the first plant means enormous savings potential. The typicals, for example for transformer feeder fields, can be reused almost 1:1, and additional fields can be documented in no time at all using drag & drop. „Since we are using as many components and suppliers as possible for this new building as well, I am very relaxed about the engineering. Thanks to EB, the effort involved will be comparatively low,“ says a pleased Dieter Dimmers.
