As General Managers, your priority is to maintain production efficiency. However, working with outdated plant designs jeopardises the heart of your operations – the foundation from which you deliver on production targets.
To address this challenge, consider redlining. Moyo Engineering has helped clients achieve R2 million in annual savings through redlining and other engineering services. Without these accurate and updated drawings, plant personnel might not be aware of recent changes in equipment and infrastructure. This can lead to safety hazards, costly fines, and even potential loss of life.
What is Redlining?
Redlining is an essential process in engineering change management, pivotal in ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of modifications in engineering documents.
This technique involves marking up technical drawings, schematics, and other documentation with annotations, corrections, and suggestions for changes. The primary purpose of redlining is to facilitate clear communication among engineers, designers, and stakeholders and ensure that all proposed changes are thoroughly reviewed and accurately implemented.
Supports Accurate Documentation
Redlining is your safety net for catching mistakes before they escalate into costly issues. Every change, big or small, is documented in real-time. If a contractor reroutes an electrical line or adds an extra valve, it is immediately noted. This ensures that the blueprints used by your engineers, technicians, and maintenance staff are always up to date, enhancing accuracy and efficiency.
By maintaining precise and current documentation, redlining helps prevent errors, safeguarding both your projects and your budget.
Success Story: Redlining for Accurate, Efficient Documentation
We recently worked with a client that needed to install new instrumentation for condition monitoring, but required updated Process and Instrumentation Diagrams. To save them future complications, our Moyo Engineering team visited them on-site to capture changes for Test and Relay equipment, camera installations, and systems like Martec, Yellotec, IQ oil, Sentinel, and Perfect Filtration.
Our redlining resulted in accurate, as-built documentation. This helped maintain quality control, ensure regulatory compliance, and mitigate risks.
But there’s more to it. We often observe clients who rely on manual drawings of their plant, which you can usually find rolled up on a shelf in their offices. This gets messy when you need to conduct redlining and make updates. We always recommend a more efficient approach:
- We scan your drawings digitally, redline them, and share them with you as PDF documents. This is cost-effective if you don’t have a large budget; you only need to update the digital drawings (documentation) yourself whenever updates are required.
- If you prefer, we can host the digital drawings ourselves and update them digitally for you as needed. This saves your team the hassle.
Strengthens Safety Measures
Safety is non-negotiable, and change management is key to upholding the highest safety standards. When you document every change, you create a clear roadmap of what’s been altered. If a safety valve is moved, that change is redlined and visible to everyone. This makes sure that safety checks and protocols are based on the most accurate information, slashing the risk of oversight.
But there’s another risk you can’t afford to overlook. Expensive, physical hardware can quickly become outdated, and it’s easy and seemingly efficient to replace defective equipment with readily available spares, patching up certain components with resources from various suppliers. The danger here is that these ad-hoc fixes can lead to inconsistencies and potential safety hazards. These patched components can fail unexpectedly without proper documentation and quality control, causing operational disruptions or accidents.
The solution is to let professional Project Engineers step in to check the quality of your hardware and equipment. Not only will they thoroughly inspect and verify the integrity of your components, but they’ll also suggest relevant solutions.
“The moment safety becomes an afterthought, you put your plant’s health, assets, and operations at risk. At Moyo, we extend the life of your plant by maintaining the necessary safety standards. This starts with redlining.” – Faan van der Linde, General Manager at Moyo Engineering.
Success Story: Redlining for Greater Safety
One of our clients faced significant risks with their slurry and cloud service water systems, including high water consumption, the inability to fully isolate the system due to undocumented tie-ins, and process inefficiencies from diluted slurry.
To address these issues, our team needed to redline the entire concentrator’s gland service water system. Here are the results of this project:
- 1ML Potable Water Savings a Month. Additionally, 2% reduction in potable water.
- Updated, Reliable Documentation. Redlining provided accurate drawings, eliminating risks of project delays and increased costs due to miscalculated plant integration. These drawings became essential for better maintenance planning and system expansions.
Redlining also provided operators with precise drawings for lockout and isolation procedures, reducing reliance on memory and significantly lowering the risk of accidents.
- Identified Inefficiencies. With updated drawings, the Moyo team pinpointed previously overlooked defects and inefficiencies. By identifying high water consumers and wastage areas, such as potable water for floor washing, our client achieved substantial water savings and reduced their plant’s environmental and carbon footprint.
Facilitates Communication
Clear annotations in redlining are more than just marks on paper – they are instructions anyone on the team can follow. With redlining, clients, engineers, architects, and contractors can easily understand and discuss proposed changes.
This is particularly useful during team meetings or site walkthroughs. The redlined documents can be reviewed together, ensuring everyone is aligned and allowing them to discuss any conflicts or dependencies in the moment.
Success Story: Redlining for Improved Communication
A client enlisted Moyo to develop their PDS water balance and dashboard and manage data from a third party. We conducted redlined markups to update drawings for Grey, Process, and potable water systems, consequently streamlining communication and identifying potential issues early.
With the accurate, updated drawings, essential instrumentation was integrated into the water system. Regular assessments of pressure, flow, and pipe conditions also helped prevent expensive repairs. Live monitoring ensured clients were alerted to water supply issues like shortages or low reservoir levels, so they could keep operations uninterrupted and safe.
Ultimately, Moyo achieved 10% – 30% potable water savings for this client, translating to R2 million in savings per annum.
“When we do redlining and detect issues like water leaks or dangerous chemicals leaking into the ground, we ensure these issues are resolved quickly and cost-effectively. Ultimately, we spot opportunities for optimisation and take swift action to address them.” – Faan van der Linde, General Manager at Moyo.
Supports Maintenance and Future Upgrades
Each redline entry tells a story – why a change was made, who authorised it, and when it was implemented. If a valve were replaced due to wear and tear, the redlined document would note the exact date of replacement, the specifications of the new valve, and any relevant maintenance instructions.
This historical context is invaluable during future inspections or audits. It allows maintenance teams to understand past decisions and predict when similar interventions might be needed.
“Maintenance is hugely important, but clients tend to be so focused on driving production that it’s easy to miss safety issues and inefficiencies. Yet overlooking maintenance can cost you anything from fines to jail time. Maintenance should be a priority, but if you’re consumed by production responsibilities, we can take care of it for you.” – Faan van der Linde, General Manager at Moyo.
Streamlines Project Management
Efficient change tracking is vital for keeping your project on course and within budget. Redlining provides a straightforward way to document every alteration as it happens. This visibility helps you manage resources better and avoid unnecessary delays.
If you need help building accountability and transparency in an engineering project, redlining can make that process more manageable. Every change recorded in the redlined documents is attributed to a specific individual or team, along with the date and reason for the change. This practice creates a transparent record that can be reviewed anytime.
Success Story: How Redlining Benefits Project Management
One engineering project required our team to integrate redlined drawings into Siemens COMOS software. The client had wisely opted for digitalisation instead of manual documentation.
As a result of this innovative redlining process, we could streamline data integration, improve collaboration between all stakeholders, ensure version control and data consistency, and strengthen interdisciplinary coordination. This modernised approach made project management more efficient and effective, as everyone could work from the same easily accessible and updated digital plans.
Get to the Heart of Your Business with Redlining
At Moyo, we aim to get to the heart of your business challenges. Managing engineering changes through redlining is how we do that; it’s the perfect place to start when you have challenges to overcome and opportunities to identify.
“We can’t have a conversation in the boardroom,” says Faan van der Linde. “At Moyo, we want to visit your plant, walk through your plant with you, and see first-hand the challenges at the heart of your business, even if it means physically getting our hands dirty – in fact, especially then.”
What challenges and opportunities lie at the heart of your company? Let us walk your plant to find out. Contact Moyo’s Consulting Engineers today.
ABOUT FAAN VAN DER LINDE
Faan van der Linde is an accomplished General Manager with extensive experience in operations within the mining and metals industry. He is highly skilled in Project Management, Process Engineering, Maintenance Management, People Management, People Development, and Mineral Processing.
A strong operations professional, Faan holds a B.Eng in Chemical Engineering from North West University and an MBA from the University of Stellenbosch Business School.