Editor’s note: This article is part three of a series on technology, data, and piping infrastructure. Read the previous installment here.
In this series, we’ve explored market trends, both new and old, that either bolster facility performance year over year or impair operations to sometimes dangerous levels. The latest trend toward attempting to gain a better understanding of your facility by digitizing and documenting what’s available often results in flawed maps. The problem lies in the source material: By leveraging pre-existing schematics, we fail to address the inaccuracies that come with outdated information.
We also reviewed tribal knowledge: contractors or tenured employees who know a facility inside and out. This simultaneously enables and hinders a facility’s day-to-day operations by siloing this knowledge and applying it only as needed—often at an added cost. Any and all knowledge of your facility has an upside and benefits your site, but a better way exists. How can we strategically develop facility knowledge and in doing so, maximize our ROI?
Documentation Dominates
A business is only as good as its facility documentation. That documentation includes keen understanding of the site (architectural), its key inner workings (assets and equipment), and, what we love most, its circulatory system (piping). Most facilities regret to admit that their current state consists of patchwork documentation.
Some maps are old, some are new but handwritten and hidden in the relevant departments, and others are absent or inaccurate due to facility evolution over the years. Even newer facilities hate to admit that a brand new building undergoes so many changes from ideation to completion that as-built maps are often immediately dated. Many of our customers came to us due to a critical impasse where they could no longer function without understanding their systems.
A lack of facility intelligence becomes an operational handicap, and this problem plays out in a variety of ways, most notably as an impediment to:
- Stakeholder collaboration in the virtual world
- Bid-spec generation and project cost containment
- Project execution and timelines, via reworks, change orders, and delays
- Sustainability planning and execution
- Day-to-day maintenance efficiency
- Plant uptime
Sustainability, For Instance
To bring this to life, let’s touch on an increasingly relevant aspect of every business’s strategy in 2025 and beyond: sustainability. Sustainability is a key piece of the puzzle, and for good reason. I don’t recall the last time I visited an industrial business website without seeing sustainability benchmarks, goals, and ongoing initiatives. But how can facility—or, specifically, piping—maps make a difference?
To accomplish sustainability goals, most businesses begin by reviewing current state and applying their experience to what is controllable. You need to know what your site can or can’t handle. This might be a keen review of safety data sheets (SDSs), power consumption metrics, emissions data and water usage metrics.
Once you’ve done the detective work, you make changes—or try to. Understanding your site as it is today, ensuring operations can continue under the stress of new processes, must preclude implementation. Additionally, determine whether the changes prescribed are reasonable, and how they would directly impact the desired metrics as well as production metrics. You also need to be able to assess all current systems for any “in tandem change” opportunities and multiplied impact.
As you go through these exercises, as you ask these questions, seek to build a keen awareness of all things current at the plant. Knowing before the project begins what exactly is required in the bid spec will reduce costs and time spent in project phases that disrupt production. Once done, substantiate the changes and implement continuous improvement processes, staying up to date as additional changes occur. Don’t let documentation fall out of date; continuing to execute on these projects as new goals present themselves requires a serious change management strategy.
Building Off the Baseline
Businesses can leverage mapping for so many things: cost control and reduction, project timing, sustainability, daily efficiencies, emergency management, collaboration from afar and so much more. The simplicity of keeping up to date is not so simple in practice without a baseline to begin with.
Here’s where HydroCorp can help. A holistic, thorough approach to understanding your piping and equipment throughout any given facility starts with a comprehensive, visual survey. This survey goes from in-field drawings to CAD schematics that are readable and accessible to your staff, in both printed and PDF formats.
Whether your facility is pursuing lofty sustainability goals or looking to drive greater operational efficiency, knowing your pipes and your facility at large is the first step. Let’s find a way to get you the info you might even know you need—but that can have such a dramatic impact across departments and business goals.
Ready to learn more about how HydroCorp can help you understand your piping systems?
