P&ID Revalidation Best Practices

Several plant disciplines incorporate P&ID revaluation and/or asset identification for various operational and compliance reasons.  We believe that the following best practices lead to an industry-best P&ID revalidation, whether being performed for PSM, environmental, or engineering reasons:

1. Plot electronic, searchable P&IDs and plot plans to field-verify equipment more efficiently.
2. Utilize intrinsically-safe tablets to capture electronic redlines.
3. Generate electronic redlines in DWF or PDF format to reduce time for CAD to updates.
4. Produce report of P&ID additions/deletions to supplement P&ID deliverables.
5. Track revalidation completion on basis of per-P&ID, piping line, and geographical area of unit.
6. Conduct Root Cause Analysis of major discrepancies which may signal a routine MOC failure?
7. Employ collaboration to merge markups, share field notes, and drive evergreen P&IDs.

Of the above best practices, we believe that employing collaboration to merge markups and share field notes will drive the biggest advancement to improve P&ID accuracy. While many collaboration tools are cloud-based (which may not be allowed in plant environments), there are ways to employ collaboration. One such way is to merge field markups and share field notes among the revalidation team.

Here is an example of how we merge markups at Ei to accomplish greater efficiency with collaboration using a non-cloud based tool, such as Autodesk Design Review 2018.

Procedure for Merging Markups in Autodesk Design Review

To copy markups from one DWF file to another so that we have one, comprehensive file that “merges” the markups. Select your pointer in the viewing space of the drawing to copy merges. Follow these commands:

Step 1: Press ‘CTRL’ + ‘A’ to Select All

Step 2: Right-click onto one Markup object to launch the Menu Panel

Step 3: Select the ‘Lock’ setting to unlock the Markups

Step 4: Re-launch the right-click menu for a Markup Object and Select -> ‘Edit’ -> ‘Copy’

Step 5: Minimize the current DWF drawing and open up and maximize the DWF in which the drawing markups will be copied into.

Step 6: Right-click in the viewing space of the drawing and press ‘CTRL’ + ‘V’ to paste in the markups. Align these markups on a proper reference point, so that they are as close to locations in the original DWF as possible.

Step 7: Save drawing and move to next DWF to merge markups. Below is a visual display of what the DWF should look like before and after merging of markups.

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