Case Study: 3-6 Month Payback Period on P&ID Highlights?

May 8, 2017
"How?" icon
How?

Whether you’re currently maintaining your LDAR highlighted P&ID or not, Ei’s LDAR P&ID highlighting subscription delivering smartPDF format P&IDs to your compliance program can save you money in as little as 5 months. How? We undertook a detailed case study to analyze the costs (and cost savings) along with various compliance operating expenses at your plant to see how. Click here to download the full case study or read below for a quick summary:

BREAKDOWN OF CASE STUDY BUDGET SAVINGS

Assumptions

We assumed an average sized petroleum or petrochemical plant with roughly 1,000 P&IDs, 40% of which are LDAR applicable. For this plant, we assumed 100,000 LDAR applicable components, the LDAR program has one (1) MOC technician, and they're revalidating/retagging their units every 5-7 years.

The Alternatives

As summarized in this previous blog post of ours, we evaluated the Ei electronic P&ID approach against the three other forms of P&ID highlighting (paper, Adobe layers, and CAD layers).

In Addition

In addition, we also considered the costs, benefits, and savings associated with other non-Environmental programs such as:

Process Safety Management (PSM) Savings:

Efficiency savings associated with having more up-to-date P&IDs every 5 years when you do a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA), considering the LDAR team uses Ei's P&IDs to collect field P&ID redlines.

Operations and Maintenance Savings:

We assumed the plant has a 1.5% LDAR leak rate, and assumed roughly half of the resulting leaks require involvement from Maintenance or operations to resolve. With Ei's electronic P&IDs (and tag numbers in the P&IDs) the a small 10-15% repair process time savings realized by having searchable P&IDs utilized by the maintenance repair specialist.

Key Results icon
Key Results

Table 1 below summarizes the results of the case study.

The results show that for Environmental departments solely looking to reduce long-term LDAR spend, implementing Ei's electronic P&IDs can save between 12-19% of total retag, QA/QC, MOC, and database update spend, with a payback period of 3-9 months (on the up-front P&ID highlighting costs of using Ei).