With increasing demands to reduce schedule and capital expenditure during the engineering phase of large complex projects in the petro-chemical industry, the need to explore alternative execution strategies is foremost in the minds of many contractors.

The pre-engineering service offered by FCL in the area of fabricated equipment offers the contractor the opportunity to:

	reduce engineering manhour expenditure on reviewing vendor documents
	reduce capital cost through standardisation in design
	fix interfaces between fabricated equipment and the plant infrastructure earlier in the project execution. Typical examples would be the fixing of foundation details for process columns and nozzle locations on shell & tube heat exchangers.
	source equipment from countries with a lower cost base
	provide sufficient definition for vendors to bid strictly on a like-for-like basis
	reduce the duration of the bidding cycle

Case Study: On a recent grass roots refinery project FCL were employed to provide mechanical design services for shell and tube heat exchangers. Deliverables included all basic design documentation to fix exchanger dimensions including setting plan, tubesheet layout and detailed dimensional drawing in addition to mechanical design calculations. Some 165 units were engineered in a range of materials for all refinery plants and offsite facilities. The units were a mix of U tube, floating head and fixed tubesheet construction.

Working side-by-side the engineering contractor from the early stages of the project, FCL were able to assist in the standardisation of component designs to minimise costs. The key documents were the setting plan and the detailed dimensional drawing which served to acheive the objectives outlined above.