Create competitive advantage in the process industries through the common language of STEP

This guide describes how standards for exchanging and sharing information about plants, processes, and plants can be applied resulting in:

Competitive edge
Reduced lead times
More productive assets
Reduced time to market
Reduced costs

The guide includes:

How design time is spent

The design time for a project can be broken down as:

Management and overheads: approximately a third
Design of the process: approximately two thirds

Of the two thirds used upon the design process, approximately three quarters is spent on value-added activities - the design process itself. The remaining quarter of this time is used in non-value-added activities such as validating or re-keying data.

This shows that up to one-sixth of project time may be taken up by ineffective data exchange and re-keying. A large proportion of the cost of this time could be saved if STEP were used.

What is STEP?

STEP (Standards for Exchange of Product Model Data) refers to a family of standards that define a common language for accurate and timely sharing and exchange of data about plant and equipment, processes and products, and with customers and suppliers. The use of STEP will not constrain you, it will merely make you more flexible.

Shared data requires more than just physical communication. As a simple analogy, to make a successful phone call from London to Beijing requires not only the physical telephone network - there must also be people at each end who speak the same language.

Further information about STEP and its applications to the process industries are available on the EPISTLE website.

Where to go from here

This guide will have provided an insight into the benefits of STEP and how it will improve the competitiveness of your company.

The implementation of STEP will require an integration project to be initiated, and that will require additional information to be supplied to your information technology professionals.

The PISTEP website includes a comprehensive listing of industry consortia, standards organisations, and recommending reading that will help you and your IT staff understand and benefit from all the STEP has to offer.

Copyright © PISTEP 2005
Based on the original PISTEP Publication "Executive Guide to STEP for the Process Industries" (1996),
designed and produced by Dyden Brown Limited (01703) 229041
Web version produced by PDT Solutions

Process Industries STEP Consortium

Create competitive advantage in the process industries through the common language of STEP

Where to go from here