February 11, 2014 - Aucotec announced Engineering Base (EB) data-based change management for plant design, which significantly reduces the risk of expensive misunderstandings. EB software is aimed particularly at the requirements of larger projects where several employees work in parallel and often have to exchange data with customers and suppliers. The system enables changes to be recognised immediately, processed specifically, and overall progress to be tracked. Even after importing new customer or supplier data, EB allows a user to recognise that changes were involved. The system indicates the data that still needs to be processed.
If several users are working internally on the same project, the system allows control over intermediate specification changes and even shows the revision step in which changes have been made. The import of large quantities of new data is another challenge in change management for which EB now provides a solution. The system platform makes data changes visible via status messages. Objects and attributes obtain configurable information such as processing status and revision affiliation, which EB sets automatically. This clarifies when the modifications were made and by whom.
After the specific processing of the necessary subsequent corrections, the status can be reset to "done". To facilitate processing the import of large amounts of data, the user specifies the exact data records he wants to import. The already imported data is then hidden in the next run due to the integrated change management. All changes are not only visible, but are assigned the correct status. This facilitates research significantly.
Furthermore, the designer can refer to explicit versions of data or documents when communicating with suppliers, customers and colleagues. The database-driven EB, which ensures that each object is present only once in the system, is crucial for this solution. Any presence of an object in lists or graphics is "only" an adapted representation of the same data. Graphically-oriented systems are incapable of proceeding in a similar traceable manner.