You Can Access Spoolgen Data Faster … and Why That Matters
Hexagon’s digital chain for piping fabrication is built around Spoolgen, which enables the digital transfer of the design between engineering and fabrication companies, usually via PCFs. This is much preferable than receiving paper drawings.
But how can you quickly know what is in isometric drawings without looking at the drawings and performing a manual take-off?
The quicker you can visualize what is in the data, the quicker you can start making decisions on it. When the files are delivered digitally you can know what is in them by setting up some dashboards to show bulk quantities. You can submit bids for the work faster with less effort and greater confidence. You can order the exact materials earlier and get a whole project view to improve planning.
SPOOLGEN WEB API: Spoolgen has a new project database for handling the files after import. An API (application programming interface) allows access to the data stored in these files. Here we look at how to report useful information about quantities from Spoolgen using PowerBI.
POWERBI: Microsoft PowerBI is a freely available tool for visualizing your data. When you add a read license to your Spoolgen server, you can connect PowerBI to Spoolgen, by treating the API as a data source. Your account manager will help you get set up with this license. Once you have access to the data behind the API, all sorts of information can be extracted.
HOW MUCH MATERIAL? You can know all the materials needed to fabricate the pipeline when you receive the piping data digitally. Using Spoolgen’s Web API Fabricators can produce a full list of materials they require to complete a set of pipelines. You can make the report interactive to help plan which pipelines or spools you are able to fabricate each day. Component type, size and pipeline are some of the properties you can use to visualize the data.
HOW MUCH CUTTING? Cutting the right lengths of pipe is an important stage of fabrication. You can design a report to see how many cuts are required. Sorting these by size is a measure of the work needed in the fab shop. You can also check there is no overlength pipe remaining, which indicates work to be done in Spoolgen.
HOW MUCH WELDING? A simple report on the welding could show the number of welds by type and size. You can see how much welding is involved in each pipeline, which allows you to price and plan the job in a timely manner.
Summary
These are examples of the data managed by Spoolgen that is available for reporting. If there is something you want to know about for work planning, we should be able to provide it directly after importing the data, in a graphical way. Please get in touch with the Hexagon PPM experts and we would be happy to help.