You may not have heard of Toyo Engineering (hereinafter referred to as TOYO), but they have a footprint in many well-known global brands like Exxon Mobile and BASF. The company provides engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) services for large-scale chemical plants, primarily serving the hydrocarbon (oil and gas) and petrochemical sectors.

Construction of state-of-the-art chemical plants is a massive undertaking that requires precise engineering for every part that is manufactured. The DX Engineering Department at TOYO is at the heart of the process, responsible for engineering tool applications for the company’s EPC projects, including 3D CAD software that is used for the design and fabrication of piping in the plants they build.

The TOYO team uses a solution called Smart 3D (S3D), powered by Hexagon, to digitize every part. The 3D database is huge – just one project contains tens of thousands of tables, with millions of records stored in each table.

Resource Overload

In order to extract data for each project, engineers had to combine dozens of tables with SQL and output to a CSV file, and then process with Excel. Each project could take thousands of hours for the millions of records that had to be pulled, cleansed, and consolidated.

Project Team Manager Jifeng Qiu said the process overloaded their resources and wasted valuable time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks.  “3D Administrators had to stop their work for a day or two for large data streams,” said Qiu. “Since Excel is not repeatable, they had to do the same task every day or every week.”

The manual process was also vulnerable to human error. “We were copying and pasting from Excel to Excel or even worse, from PDF to Excel,” said Ippei Nakagawa, Alteryx CoE Member at TOYO. “Sometimes a digit or two would be missing but we didn’t realize it because we thought we were doing everything correctly,” said Qiu. The errors wouldn’t be noticed until the process was downstream, sometimes a month or two later, causing expensive and unnecessary delays or re-works.

Automating a Complicated Engineering Process

As part of TOYO’s larger mission to promote digital transformation, the DX Engineering team adopted Alteryx Server and Designer to automate the tedious and time-consuming process of extracting data and generating reports, 3D modeling work and design quality control check.

The key to automating the process was an API connection. With Alteryx, TOYO set up an API with S3D and automated design rules so engineers could build models within Alteryx.

Using Alteryx significantly reduces the number of SQL types and users can create multiple reports (some workflows extract 30 kinds of reports) with different purposes at the same time. Qiu says his team is running more than 100 schedules and generating 250 kinds of reports and 1,700 files every day for multiple projects on Alteryx Server. “Alteryx can make the impossible possible. We have automated the complicated 3D modeling work process required for construction DWG generation by Alteryx, which was considered impossible before introducing Alteryx,” said Daisuke Tsuchiya, 3D CAD R&D Task Leader. He estimates they have saved more than 38,000 hours on one project alone, which equals an 85% reduction in man-hours.

Getting started with Alteryx was easy and contributed to fast time to value. The no-code, low-code, drag-and-drop capabilities enable TOYO users of all skill levels to build workflows and reports without assistance from data experts.

“Alteryx is very easy to use for Excel users without IT or programming skills,” said Motoi Tokimatsu, Senior Engineer of the R&D Team. “They can easily develop workflows and get the required output by themselves.”

Empowering engineers and other business users with automated analytics is accelerating digital transformation efforts and a data-driven culture at TOYO. The time saved using Alteryx is also opening new opportunities for innovation. “We can use the extra time to focus on education and improving design quality,” says Nakagawa.

Improvements in quality have downstream benefits by reducing design changes, re-works and expenses at the construction site. Field Revision Instruction, or FRI, which is issued to construction contractors to solve issues such as modifying pipe routes to solve the clash or design errors. “Having to make a fix to an error found during an FRI can drive up organizational expenses by 10x,” said Qiu.

TOYO’s analytics automation for the design quality control checked by Alteryx has significantly reduced the drawing checking man-hours and number of re-works at the construction site and the risk of having to cover costs resulting from an error being found during the installation.

Qiu sees unlimited possibilities using Alteryx in the future. He envisions leveraging AI for predictive capabilities to estimate how to make better cost estimations for clients based on historical data.

For now, Qiu and his team are happy to have the days of time-consuming, manual work behind them. Instead, they are focusing on using advanced technologies like Alteryx to make flawless products and happy customers.