InGEN is a consolidated power plant management product fostered in its initial stages in 2003 by one of Spain's largest electricity generation companies and since then has been adapted to the needs of the most relevant generation technologies from traditional coal fired power stations to modern-day renewable energy plants.
Product development between 2005 and 2010 was centered around three strategic lines:
- Expansion to all areas of industrial plant management. In addition to maintenance and operation, new modules were incorporated such as fuel supply logistics management and environmental management focused on regulatory compliance.
- This functional expansion created a growing need for integration with other plant systems, e.g., real-time platforms, and other corporate systems such as ERP and BI data exploitation tools.
- Growth into new business areas and industries, such as gas plants or wind farms, benefiting from the synergies between industrial processes
While the product has continued growing along these three strategic lines in recent years, product developments have had a much higher impact in terms of technology, as the product is adapted to the new trends in digital transformation such as IoT platforms, integration with other monitoring and diagnostic tools, full mobilization of field processes and developments on open source platforms.
As a result of the work done throughout all these years and joint efforts with leading energy companies, InGEN emerged as the first integrated, modular and complete product capable of supporting power generation company management processes. Developed entirely by Indra, this product has recently begun a period of functional and technological growth, covering different industrial areas beyond electricity generation.
Plant Management Process Map
InGEN is a tool conceived to support the users of plants and their different areas, replicating not only the structure of a plant and its business processes, but also communication between horizontal departments, e.g., between the plant operation and maintenance teams, and vertical departments or generation offices, where there is a convergence of information for all the plants.
InGEN's basic functionality enables comprehensive plant management by supporting the following essential processes:
Operation
Operation management functions are divided into different yet interrelated sub-modules. Each one covers a specific operational function at the production facility.
Monitoring: operators work with basic system and equipment monitoring through real-time platforms, though it is essential to provide them with greater monitoring capabilities involving all the areas of the plant:
- Record book and shift management: manual and automatic record keeping through real-time integration with systems, activities and events occurring at production facilities. Operators use the book to maintain a record of the status of the plant, relevant events, shift entries and exits, and notifications from other departments. (Outage, maintenance work, incidents, etc.).
- The record book is the ideal communication channel between production plants and the generation office. InGEN enables users to check which entries in each plant book are of interest to the office and even configure a specific book in this regard for logging notifications from any plant.
- Plant incidents: operators working in the field in direct contact with the equipment and facilities are familiar with their operation and can identify abnormalities or incidents that require corrective actions to mitigate adverse effects.
- Production planning and monitoring: establishing a production plan and calculating production deviations from this planning.
Safety and production: safety is a key operation and maintenance parameter at production facilities. The system also has the following useful functional features for managing these processes:
- Work Permit Management : equipment de-energization and work permit management, establishing appropriate procedures and safety instructions necessary for operation and maintenance work. This function establishes an approval flow that begins with the request for permission from the maintenance module, ensuring coordination between both teams.
- Complex sequences and isolation dismounting tasks can be managed with this function, printing the associated hazard cards. It also has safety mailbox and equipment lockout key management as an option
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Reports: the system enables the definition of a series of reports and indicators through tools such as Excel or data exploitation tools to get the most relevant information of the operation at individual and aggregated levels for comparing all the plants:
- Daily production report, plant balances, rates of availability, material and energy balances, hours in operation of the most relevant groups, etc.
Maintenance
The maintenance module covers all the functions related to scheduling and subsequently executing and analyzing work.
Asset management: it is essential for the maintenance team to be able to monitor equipment throughout its useful life and know the maintenance costs associated with each asset at all times so that alarms can be established on the basis of these costs, warranty periods, depending on operating conditions, etc. InGEN enables this sort of monitoring and the definition of support information for executing work such as explosion drawings, groups of spare parts, equipment groupings, etc.
Work order management: it is essential to have a record of all work carried out in the plant throughout the process flow. During planning, the system can keep a record maintenance procedures and safety instructions, contractors who will execute the work and resource planning in hours of work, materials, spare parts, direct purchases, etc.
The maintenance notification function can send emails and text messages to the persons involved, informing them of the execution of a work or its completion and thus useful for coordinating all plant personnel.
After completing the work, users must complete a final report to send feedback to the responsible engineers and must attribute all the actual costs associated with the work order.
Scheduled maintenance: InGEN lets users define their own maintenance plans based on specific periods, operating hours or condition of a system, obtaining real-time information on operating parameters of each equipment from the platforms.
Warehouses and spare parts: there is a specific warehouse management module in InGEN to create and maintain the catalog of materials and record all warehouse movements, including dispatches and returns against maintenance work or reservations for materials.
It has a series of advanced functions for supporting maintenance engineers, that are the differential elements in relation to other maintenance management products:
Technical inspections: it enables inventory of the different applicable inspection regulations and the execution of work complying with legislation in force. The system enables automatic calculation of inspection regularity considering each regulation and based on the technical characteristics of the equipment. The inspection log for each equipment simplifies the review of compliance with the regulations.
Reviews and stops: this functionality was specifically designed for in-depth tracking of offline plant maintenance tasks. It enables the structuring of tasks with a detail of different levels, establishing a budget according to various concepts (maintenance services, levels, etc.). The function simplifies visibility of all tasks as a whole.
Fuel
This module includes all the functional features needed for comprehensive management of the plant fuel supply cycle, considering all the processes involved in the cycle:
Supply chain: fuel management begins by entering the contractual conditions with the supplier into the system and defining the supply chain. Based on this, the system logistically and economically monitors every point along the chain, recording fuel deliveries and analyzing their quality, setting penalties for prices or automatic rejections based on deviations.
Inventories: the system enables users to ascertain available inventories, their quality and economic appraisal at all times at individual and aggregate plant levels throughout the company. Inventory adjustments are made on the basis of this function to define adjustments or losses at production facilities.
Consumption: a manual or automatic record can be made of the fuel consumption of production units in terms of quantity and quality to ascertain the fuel consumed per unit produced.
Environment
This module enables environmental parameter monitoring and control for air pollution emissions and waste generated in the production process:
Emissions: plant emissions are controlled by defining alarm levels, and the information is obtained from real-time platforms. Users must validate these alarms and correct possible errors
Waste management: all waste generated in production plants require specific management to classify them according to their hazards, and control their storage and transportation, monitoring the stored quantity and time inside the warehouse. Legal and internal company reports are generated such as corporate responsibility, environmental indicators, etc.
Benefits and added value of InGEN
InGEN stands out in the world of plant management for its ability to cover the entire operation cycle of electricity production facilities by implementing a global solution that maintains all management processes perfectly integrated with one another under a single framework.
The product's maturity and modular nature have also boosted the implementation of InGEN as a solution specifically for a series of modules or concrete functions. Its ability to integrate with other horizontal and vertical systems favors solutions of this sort, where Indra has an extensive inventory of integrations already developed and implemented.
Our experience has enabled us to provide leading technology and business expertise to help energy companies in the petroleum, gas, electricity and water industries to overcome their primary challenges via:
- Development of new energy infrastructures.
- Optimized availability and useful life of facilities.
- Operation and maintenance efficiency.
- Optimization of production costs.
- Sustainability of operations.
InGEN is a mature product implemented across 4 continents.
