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Written by Peter Cleaveland, Valve Magazine contributing editor
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Wednesday, 23 June 2010 13:47 |
 One of the presentations at the Aramco Services Company Technical Exchange Meeting in Houston in early May was entitled “Improving the Value Chain for Valves through Standardization of Metadata.” In it the presenters—Sharon Bickford, project manager at FIATECH; Ken Hamilton, project manager at PIP; Rick Hoenerhoff, associate director at PIP; and John Fish, who works in the area of customer relationships & quality assurance for Ford, Bacon, and Davis, LLC —pointed out that the process for managing valves on a project has not changed in 40 years. That's pretty slow considering that valves now make up a market that, by some estimates, is as high as $10 billion a year. If just 2% of that amount is wasted it accounts for $200 million annually. Standardization and automation, the presenters said, would help eliminate redundant activities, reduce both time and errors, and cut costs all around.
This would be accomplished through adoption of a Global Valve Cross-reference eCatalog (GVCC), Web-based sharing of vendor and technical data, industry standards for RFID valve tagging and streamlining of the valve value chain.
But who or what are PIP and FIATECH, and what is metadata, anyway? This article will answer these questions and explain where this effort is going.
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