INEIGHT CASE STUDY:
HEIDELBERG MATERIALS
MAKING COMPLEX PLANS A REALITY
The new Heidelberg Materials Mitchell, Indiana plant s a $600+ million construction project to replace three existing kilns with a single kiln capable of producing 7,000 metric tons of cement a day. The new kiln and surrounding infrastructure includes a large amount of automated and/or instrumented industrial equipment, all of which must work smoothly and reliably, potentially for decades.
“The commissioning process aims to ensure that the construction and installation phases have been executed correctly, and that the plant is ready for final tuning and production,” says Ransom Blevins. “The Mitchell project will result in a fairly automated plant, which requires a significant amount of complexity to manage. We were anticipating the need to manage around 50,000 technical drawings, but we ended up with 67,000. There was no way to handle that volume without some kind of document control solution, particularly as we needed to be able to exchange documents with multiple external contractors.”
“The commissioning process aims to ensure that the construction and installation phases have been executed correctly, and that the plant is ready for final tuning and production.”
-Ransom Blevins, Deputy Site Construction Manager
millon construction project
single kiln capable of producing 7,000 metric tons of cement a day
managed technical drawings
MAINTAINING A CLEAR VIEW
As part of the first digital commissioning project in the history of the corporation, Heidelberg Materials decided to use InEight Document to manage all project-related documentation. “InEight was willing to work with us to make the pricing work for our needs,” says Marjorie Gore. “We originally designed the solution to help us during the design and build phase, but we also used it to help create our handover package to the plant management team.”
During the bid proposal, Heidelberg Materials used InEight Document to help manage the back-and-forth of documents and questions between its own team and the external contractors. The InEight solution stores a full history of the revisions made to technical drawings during the bid process and beyond. This made it possible for project engineers, equipment suppliers, and contractors to ensure the construction and fit-out ran smoothly.
“It’s easy to pull up the history of a technical drawing, and also to confirm that all parties have had access to the current version in the event of a contractual dispute,” says Marjorie Gore. “To help our field engineers, who work remotely on military-grade tablets, we leveraged the InEight Excel upload tool to create a list of hyperlinks so they could find and access drawings that had been downloaded from InEight. This allowed access to the drawings in locations without internet access. We could have done that manually, but with more than 9,000 drawings, it would have taken significantly longer.”