Service · Integration
System and package integration
The gap between several correct datasheets and one working process. Integration is where projects are quietly won or lost.
Overview
Overview
Most industrial plants are assembled from equipment supplied by several vendors, each of which meets its own specification. The plant, however, is judged on whether the whole thing works — and the space between those datasheets is where performance guarantees, control philosophies and responsibility boundaries tend to fall through.
Integration is the discipline of closing that gap. It covers package integration, system integration, skid and module design, control and instrumentation interfaces, utility interfaces, and the factory acceptance testing that proves the assembly works before it reaches site rather than after.
We do this in two situations. When we supply a package ourselves and it has to fit into a wider plant. And when a client has bought equipment from several sources and needs one party to take responsibility for making it behave as a single process.
Detail
What integration covers
Mechanical and process
- Package integration
- Skid and module design
- Rotary machinery package integration
- Refrigeration package integration
- Material handling system integration
- Gas separation and high-purity gas system integration
Control and instrumentation
- Instrumentation and control system engineering
- Analyzer system integration and integrated staging
- Control interface definition between packages
- Sample conditioning and sampling system engineering
Proving it
- Factory acceptance testing (FAT)
- Site acceptance testing (SAT)
- Integrated staging before shipment
- Commissioning and start-up
Detail
Where integration usually fails
Two vendors each design to their own boundary, and the fifty millimetres between them belongs to nobody. Defining interfaces — mechanical, electrical, control and process — before procurement is cheaper than discovering them during commissioning.
Each package arrives with its own local control, and no one has decided what the plant does when one of them trips. That decision is a process decision, and it has to be made by someone who understands the whole line.
Instrument air, cooling water, steam and power added up from individual datasheets produce a utility plant that is either oversized and expensive or undersized and limiting. Diversity has to be assessed across the plant.
Faults found during factory acceptance testing cost a fraction of the same faults found on site. Integrated staging — assembling and testing multiple packages together before shipment — is why we hold the space to store up to 25 analyzer shelters simultaneously.
On process plants, the water system frequently determines whether the main process performs. Integrating it as an afterthought is one of the most common and most expensive integration failures we are called in to correct.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Can you integrate equipment we bought elsewhere?
Yes. That is one of the two main situations integration work arises in. We would need the datasheets, the control descriptions and access to the vendors, and we would want to be involved before all the equipment is ordered where that is still possible.
Do you carry out factory acceptance testing?
Yes, including integrated staging where multiple packages are assembled and tested together before shipment. Site acceptance testing follows on site.
What is integrated staging?
Assembling and testing the packages of a project together in the workshop as they will be connected on site, rather than testing each one in isolation. It surfaces interface problems while they are still cheap to fix.
Who takes performance responsibility after integration?
That depends on the contract, and we settle it before starting. Where we integrate a full process we can take performance responsibility for it; where we integrate equipment whose selection we did not control, we are explicit about what we can and cannot guarantee.
Conversion
Take this further
Send us the stream data, the discharge limit or the equipment list you are working from. An engineer reads every enquiry and replies with the questions that actually decide the solution — not a brochure.
Contact
Talk it through
Describe the decision, the deadline and the constraint. That is usually enough for us to say what we would do and what it would take.