ENERGY/PROCESS

The process industry covers all industrial sectors centred on a process and the industrial site designed to carry it out.

These include mainly the energy, oil, gas and chemical industries.

Recent changes have led to a significant modifications to the sector's traditional constraints and the solutions to be put in place:

• Globalization of the market and companies in the sector is leading to increased project globalization. The geographic and cultural diversity of the players necessarily involves integrating different skills and processes. The time and space distances between those actors require that integrated and innovative cooperative systems be put in place.
  
• The nature of the traditional frontiers in terms of contractual deliverables between engineers, who are responsible for design, and industrial operators are changing. This move from paper information to structured digital information is resulting in an need for increased integration of those players' traditionally separate information systems.
  
• Successive waves of environmental standards are resulting in site modification projects and are helping to significantly increase activity in this sector. Moreover, energy cost increases and growing margins also contribute to this increase in activity. These new developments imply an increased need for cost and, particularly, time effectiveness.
  

All those factors result in a need for innovation in putting integrated and powerful information systems in place to accompany those changes