The interview between Tom Van Laan and Plant and Process Magazine was published on February 1st, 2010 in the Plant and Process Magazine, Japanese edition. Here is a summary of what was discussed during this interview.
Question 1: Can you tell us how you see the current situation of the plant design and engineering industry?
Tom Van Laan explained that the industry is under greater pressure to complete projects in less and less time, but with fewer experienced and engineers this has become more and more difficult. The aim is to allow those same (inexperienced and experienced) workers to become more efficient and therefore reduce the time taken at each step of the design and engineering process. This is what COADE helps do.
Question 2: Could you share something about COADE's experience and achievements?
COADE has been servicing the plant design and engineering market for the past 25 years. Since its inception in 1984, COADE has introduced the following packages to the industry; CAESAR II, for pipe stress analysis; CADWorx, for plant design; PV Elite, pressure vessel and exchanger design and analysis. He highlighted that COADE's success in this industry has yielded an 80% worldwide market share for CAESAR II.
Question 3. Why does COADE hold an 80% of the pipe stress analysis market?
1. While, at the time, all pipe stress programs were running on mainframes CAESAR II was the first commercially available package that could run on a PC. It is now the standard against which all pipe stress packages are measured, and has now become the de facto standard.
2. Most COADE staff are engineers and designers, with real world experience. This means that COADE staff understands customer needs and is able to communicate with them in ways that make sense to them.
Question 4. What are the characteristics of COADE's product line?
COADE provides a high level of integration between its software offerings. Tom Van Laan highlighted how integration benefits engineers and designers by enabling them to share the same information from the design stage all the way through to analysis, and back. Only COADE can provide its customers such high levels of integration between the design and engineering disciplines.
Question 5. What are the benefits of software integration?
Integration saves time by reducing the unnecessary processes in the design and analysis timeline. For example; one-click data exchange without information loss, being able to always work on the latest design or analysis model, reducing man-made mistakes, etc. These all result in creating higher quality projects, with less man-hours and therefore a lower cost.
Question 6: How does CAESAR II user artificial intelligence (AI)?
The use of AI in CAESAR II is exhibited by the program's Loop Optimization Wizard. This technology can not only assist the younger and less experienced engineer, but also, is a great time saver to the more experienced engineer.
Question 7: What's next?
Continued focus on the Japanese market, by providing solutions that address the needs of our customers.
