How Can You Use Us - Process Engineering Associates, LLC.

HEY, Operating Company Corporate Engineering – How Can You Use Us?

Operating company Corporate Engineering Groups we talk to for the first time often say something like “I know we need process help, but how can we effectively use you?”

Lower your company’s risk, both from a Return on Investment (ROI) perspective and from a Safety perspective.

Lower ROI Risk – By utilizing outside companies that are really good at what they do, you can rest easier knowing that you are benefiting from their experience and efficiency which translates into higher quality work products and lower overall project costs. In process design terms that means your design basis has captured all the important items, the mass & energy balance is complete and accurate, equipment will be correctly selected and sized, and effective control schemes have been integrated into the process. In addition, any risk of the process not working as intended (missing physical property information, etc.) is known, quantified, and accounted for.

Lower Safety Risk – A well thought out process design will take into account both the inherent process safety issues (corrosivity, toxicity, exotherms, etc.) as well as operational safety issues (limiting personnel chemical exposure, ergonomic operator actions, proper level of automation, etc.). A critical evaluation and integration of such aspects should be baked into the process design effort to the extent possible and not left to hopefully be addressed in a safety review (PHA) or considered later during detail engineering. Most of PROCESS’ engineers have years of plant operations experience and know how to design safety into a process from the beginning. So, while it is recognized that some of the safety aspects of any process cannot be completely addressed until detailed engineering, it is wise to identify as many safety issues as possible during process design, and PROCESS has the requisite experience to do this.

Gain significantly more value out of your corporate process engineers and/or on-site plant process engineers by focusing their efforts on making good, innovative suggestions and decisions that will help advance your operations in significant ways. Let’s face it, many if not most process engineers get caught up spending most of their time addressing operational issues, identifying corrective measures, and then performing the necessary design work to develop those solutions and install them. PROCESS can help do the ‘heavy lifting’ by very efficiently performing the preliminary process design evaluations (FEL-0, 1) and detailed process design work (FEL-2, 3) after improvement projects have been identified by your process engineers. This allows your process engineering staff to stay focused on supporting daily operations (plant engineers), identifying innovative change projects (plant and corporate), and bringing those improvement projects on-line (typically corporate).

During detail engineering and through construction & startup, PROCESS can play a low-level but critical role as an Owner’s Process Engineer. If we performed the FEL work then we will be intimately familiar with the process, the process design, and the design intent. Our process engineers are familiar with supporting clients through all phases of project development and can independently help you monitor your project to make sure it goes as planned and operates as intended after startup.

View Example Corporate Engineering Project Support projects we have performed.

Give us a call and we can help explain how you can augment your existing process group with high-end, experienced chemical engineers. It’s a win-win situation, as many Corporate Engineering Groups have already discovered.