Lean Engineering and Lean Information Management Make Data Flow in Plant Engineering Processes

The plant engineering process is characterized by high complexity, diverse interfaces and multidisciplinary processes. Today, there is still no standardized reference process architecture. A proven procedure is to use and adapt existing planning documents with certain similarities to a new project. This involves lots of effort not only in the design phase but much more in the semantic adaptation, resulting from redesign and reprogramming. Due to these challenges and the increasing importance of data as gold of digital age, a continuous flow of data and information is becoming even more important in plant engineering. Creating a solid base of engineering and operation data free of waste supports effectiveness and efficiency during the entire product life cycle. A new approach is to design general and configurable production modules. Just as virtual commissioning brings considerable time and quality benefits, the design of defined process steps in advance of a customer order is intended to bring forward some of the tasks, standardize multidisciplinary work and unify the data base. The aim of this paper is to present the lean-based concept of configurable production modules. Thereby, a focus is especially on lean information management to achieve an effective as well as an efficient plant engineering process and to create the requirements for a lean production process. The concept of configurable production modules is applied to the example of the plant design process of automated production plants for hydrogen electrolyzers.