Overview
A material-handling systems integrator from the US was designing new discharge conveyors for nine case-packer lines in a food processing and packaging plant in Mississauga. Conveyors in a running plant get threaded through whatever is already there: the existing lines, columns, mezzanines, platforms, piping and cable tray, most of it installed over years and none of it exactly where the old drawings say. It is a typical brownfield industrial project: the new equipment has to be designed around production lines, structure, utilities and equipment that have piled up through years of plant modifications. Before the new conveyors were engineered and built, the integrator needed the plant as it really is, and the plant owner wanted the same data for their own capital projects.
The catch was time. The plant could stop production for two days over the holidays, a Friday and a Saturday, and that was the window. Everything had to be captured in that shutdown, because there was not going to be another one.
It is also a project with two sets of users who needed two different things from the same scan. The contractor laying out the new lines worked in 2D and needed a plan. The engineers, the consultants and the OEM suppliers needed the third dimension, sections, heights and an IFC they could take into SolidWorks and Navisworks. Both were right. The job needed both.
Mobile first, then not
The first idea was mobile scanning. It is fast, and on a two-day shutdown fast sounds like the right answer. We tried it, and it became clear pretty quickly that it was not going to carry this job. The precision was not where it needed to be for equipment that has to line up with existing conveyors, and mobile does not give you the 360° colour imagery or the point density that the engineers were going to need to tell a pipe from a cable tray from a guard rail on a packed production floor. Mobile ended up as a secondary dataset. The main capture was terrestrial, on a tripod, at high density, with colour 360° images at every station.
That decision cost time. The site was also more complex than anyone had planned for, so we stayed the extra half day rather than leave gaps. In the end it was about 235 scan positions over two and a half days.
The data, and who it was for
The integrator’s site partner walked the lines with us and gave us their line nomenclature, so the point cloud and everything drawn from it used the same names the engineers used. That sounds small. It saves days.
There were two audiences from the start. The plant owner wanted the data for their own capital projects, but the data went through the integrator’s engineering contractor, and the deliverables were agreed with them. The contractor worked in 2D and wanted a floor plan, which for laying out conveyor routes is exactly the right tool. So the first agreed deliverable was a 2D plan, and that was not wrong. It was just half of what the project was going to need.
We delivered the point cloud as an RCP for AutoCAD and Recap, with a 360° walkthrough for everyone who was not going to open a point cloud. There was a units question on the way, metres in the cloud and inches in their CAD, and we sorted it on a call rather than by reprocessing anything.
2D for the contractor
The 2D floor plan went out three weeks after the scan: the nine lines, the equipment footprints, the column grid, the routes the new conveyors would have to take, plus one extra area they asked for. For the contractor’s job, laying out the new discharge conveyors on the floor, that plan did what it needed to do.
The questions the plan could not answer came from the other side. A plan tells you where a conveyor is. It does not tell you how high it is off the floor, how much room there is between the conveyor and the mezzanine above it, or how the mezzanine relates to the floor. The engineers designing the new equipment, and the OEM suppliers building it, needed that vertical space, and a 2D drawing does not have it.
3D for the engineers
The contractor’s view, at first, was that 2D was all the project needed, and from where they sat that was true. We sat down with the team more than once and walked through what the 3D would give the rest of them: internal elevations, sections wherever they wanted them, the X, Y and Z of every element, and the layering so the mechanical and electrical people could switch things on and off. Once the engineers were in the room, the answer was yes, and we built the 3D model from the same point cloud. No second scan, no second shutdown.
Where the 3D went
From the model we exported an IFC, and the integrator brought it into SolidWorks, which is where their equipment lives. That one file did more than the original 2D was ever going to do. The industrial engineers and project managers used it to lay out the new conveyors. The mechanical and electrical engineers used it for their own routing. The consultants used it. And they imported the OEM equipment files into it and ran clash detection in Navisworks against the as-built plant before anything was fabricated.
That is the outcome. The scan became the one as-built dataset everyone on the conveyor retrofit worked from: the contractor laid out the lines in 2D, the engineers and suppliers checked the new equipment against the real building in 3D, and both came out of the same two days of shutdown.
What we learned
Mobile scanning is fast, and on a production floor full of conveyors, that is not the same as useful. If the new equipment has to meet existing equipment, plan for terrestrial and plan for the time.
Ask who is going to use the data, not just who is buying it. The contractor needed 2D. The plant owner, the engineers, the consultants and the OEM suppliers needed 3D. Both were right, and if we had had everyone in the room on day one we would have quoted both from the start and saved a few weeks.
A plan and a section answer different questions. “Where does it go” is a plan. “Will it fit” is a section. A conveyor line needs both.
Agree the shutdown window early and scan more than you think you need. There is no going back for the bit you missed.
Planning new equipment in a plant that can’t stop for long? Have a look at our industrial laser scanning and Scan-to-BIM services, 3D laser scanning in Toronto, or the difference between static and mobile LiDAR.
