Design management

On a large plant, design management is a job of its own. Process, piping, mechanical, civil, electrical, high-voltage distribution, and automation are often different designers, and sometimes different contracts. Someone has to hold them to one basis of design. That is not the same task as producing the drawings. Preliminary design, FEED, and detailed design are the design stages. Design management is how those stages stay one plant when the plant is too large for a single designer to carry in their head.

The basis of design is the document the others are checked against: feedstock, capacity, discharge limit, site voltage, and which product the plant is actually making. An interface register then names the points where two packages meet. A nozzle and the pipe that lands on it. A motor load and the board that feeds it. An instrument and the controller that reads it. A vessel weight and the foundation that takes it. A solar inverter and the site distribution it connects into. If those points are not written down, they are discovered when the steel does not fit.

Reviews are held at the gates, not only at the end. A change in gas quality, in a trip, or in the layout has to be seen by every package it touches before the drawing is issued for construction. The register of those changes is what project and contract management uses when the change is also a variation. Design management does not let the contract, and it does not supervise the installation. It keeps the issued design consistent enough that construction has one set of drawings to build.