The Chemistry of Engineering

My company finally changed from MS Excel 2003 to 2007. Part of this late change is compatibility with other programs and of course the natural drive of some engineers to hack their own macros into a worksheet. If such a file proves useful to other engineers, suddenly a tool is born. This gets checked against a number of hand calculated situations and if the outcome pleases everybody the tool is ‘verified’.

Well if everybody has the skills and the will to write proper macro’s there is not so much of a problem. However hitting the record macro button and save whatever comes out is not a good practice in my humble opinion. But that happens a lot. continue reading…

The other night I was reading my corporate emails and found out that coming months are going to be more exciting than expected.

There is an upstream project about to start, which will be in the FEED phase. The project comprises development of three sets of P&ID’s, for three phases of construction. Not realy a technological challenge, but there is enough to learn and it leaves room for other activities to be done.

One of my roles in the project will be Process Systems Engineer. I will look after the overall quality of the P&ID’s, keep an eye on the consistency and I will be involved in SmartPlant activities.

Another role is that of Process Engineer. I will be doing regular process activities like calculations and dealing with design issues.

Finally I will be coordinating the conversion of Excel tools from version 2003 to 2007. This will be a tedious task whith a lot of uncertainties. A real challenge thus.