SmartPlant Foundation is a commercially available, process industry-standard data warehouse using a business object data model for plant information management. This ensures an open system and an independent data storage system to protect plant information, regardless of the IT infrastructure in place. It preserves data for the entire life cycle of the plant.

SmartPlant Foundation provides a platform for data exchange, sharing, and integration across technical systems, and enables concurrent use and rapid communication among all project participants, according to the demands and practices of a global industry. It is compatible with ISO15926 (Posc/caesar D), a well known standard for relational architecture, ensuring critical information is stored only once in the data-neutral warehouse, eliminating duplication and ensuring that accurate, timely data is always available.

Importantly, SmartPlant Foundation provides both data and document managements and is an integration point to the financial, commercial, and operational systems within an organisation, linking these disparate yet related domains. SmartPlant Foundation enables consideration of technical specifications along with procurement requirements, impacts of change from a maintenance perspective, cost roll-ups of project deliveries - all within a consistent, deployable environment.

Pat Thomson, sales director at Intergraph Systems says: "Using data in a concurrent environment not only saves money, but also time and the accruing interest that has to be paid on the capital investment before the plant is even in production. Such standards also ensure data integrity for the owner or operator."

For more information contact Pat Thomson, Intergraph Systems Southern Africa, 011 313 1222, pthomson@intergraph.co.za