Global Business Environment
for desalination and water treatment projects

2. Documentation life cycle management

GBE maintains single point of entry into the project. It means concurrent uploading, downloading, viewing and modifying the same version of the document - schedule, specification, budget proposal or drawing - from any location. Decision-making processes will be based on reliable and up-to-date information transparent to all the project participants. It gives freedom to concentrate on project engineering rather than waste time on the project data updates management. GBE manages document revisions and approvals meticulously and with unmatched exactness - every motion is watched and every update is automatically recorded. Depending on the P&ID status GBE may store revisions or immediately email them to the topic subscribers, sort and search them, and delete the old ones. Contrary to the accepted practice, the revision content is separated from documents. This drastically reduces the information volume transmitted with the revision batch. Move from the revision to equipment item is as simple as a mouse click. GBE sorting revisions to topics is fully automated and further decreases the volume of irrelevant information sent. Very useful feature is garbage collection - automatic erasure of the outdated revisions from the database. GBE simplifies the most cumbersome tasks in document management: review and approval of documents. It is flexible enough to enable the user to define all requirements of this process and modify them as needed throughout the cycle. He or she can predefine all relevant elements to the review and approval process including individuals involved formats and deadlines.
The in-built documentation catalog includes more than 60 general requirements specifications and standards and features the user authentication and authorization, searching and sorting capabilities, spelling checking, revision tracking, maintenance of the reviewer and approver lists, approval tracking, deleted documents rescue, revision posting to subscribers and garbage collection. GBE allows performing the exact-match and partial-match searches of specifications to leverage on the previous project database and standardization benefits.
The selected data repository model (3-tier server) suits best the collaborative design approach adopted in GBE. Depending on the company size, different database back-ends are recommended: H2, Apache Derby RDBMS, IBM DB2 Express-C, OracleX and others.
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