SONGS reaches silos

By Bob Sperber, editor at large

PlantServices.com

One of the largest U.S. nuclear power plants, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County, Calif., recently tied its varied condition-monitoring systems to the Ivara EXP Enterprise performance-management “middleware” system and is now interfacing that to SAP’s Plant Maintenance module.

The Ivara solution develops condition-based activities by defining the frequency, scope and related information, and sending it to SAP to be managed. The system aggregates information from “siloed pockets of data” that have now been narrowed to two main data systems (one for nuclear and another for conventional fossil fuel and hydroelectric power). Despite the availability of off-the-shelf interfaces, the project team wanted more application-specific integration. The team, led by Darryl Barney, monitoring and asset reliability system product manager, integrated several systems and included standard interfaces as well as custom programming of 17 connections between Ivara and SAP to collect condition-monitoring data where the plant wanted deeper-than-standard functionality. “Fortunately, our databases were in Oracle so we were able to use a single, common interface,” Barney says.

Integration efforts have in part been prompted by the need for continuous improvement and meeting a critical reliability standard (INPO AP-913). But the results of having a seamless, central repository include reducing some task times from hours to minutes.