Advantages?

[ReMark]

I'd contemplate moving to AutoCAD P&ID but even as a small chemical manufacturing company we have better than 200 P&IDs dating back some 20 years. It would be a tough sell even in the best of economic climates to convince the company it would be worthwhile moving to such a package. Yeah, yeah, yeah I hear you about the benefits but all the beancounters see is the drawings we now have are pretty much done and only have to be updated when an engineering change notice is issued. Some P&IDs haven't been touched in a dozen years.

[DANIEL]

I'm in a similar situation as ReMark, in fact some are scanned in from hand drawings, at any rate, I think this PI&D forum could really benifit from someone like you, I make no arguements about not being fully informed on the product, as I told ReMark, I did not spend a lot of time on the trial and admitt there is alot i was likely missing. Hopefully I can get some time to look at it closer, but honestly, its not looking good, work takes presedence.

[Gsilva]

Existing plants are the hardest sell. There is no good way of taking existing drawings and making them intelligent without redrawing them. The real savings are in new construction. I have over 20 years of experience in the large engineering companies as a piping designer or Cad Coordinator. We would do P&ID's for a large job and I remember seeing a Material Takeoff Tech highlighting all the valves on a P&ID for a material drag. And at the same time the Instrument guy was doing the same thing for Instruments while someone else was doing a line list. Intelligent P&ID's may take the guy drawing them a little longer to draw but it saves hours because it eliminates the work after they are done. But of course we all know the P&ID’s are the last thing finished and they are never actually finished. It’s the same thing with intelligent piping drawings as we draw in 3D at the same time we have our sections, Plans and Automatic Isometrics and Bill of material. Yes it may take a little longer at the start but at the end you have a ton of deliverables.

[ReMark]

Well we haven't been entirely stuck in the past. For a new project three years ago we combined our P&ID symbols with attributes so we could get an accurate count of valves, instruments, etc. along with the process tag numbers but that is as far as it went. I had suggested we add descriptions (manufacturer, model number, cost, etc.) but the lead chemical engineer balked at the idea and management did not overrule him. At least I tried. Hey, that's why I put the letters n.t.e. after my name/signature. When asked what that means I reply, "Not the engineer".

[amokbelx]

I've downloaded the trial version of P&ID 2009 and I am quite happy with it. I share about everybody's comments... P&ID is great for new construction, new projects and new consulting (like us) where we don't have a database of 10's of P&IDs to redraw...

When I start my firm, I looked for something that would help me to do the design/engineering quickly. I used Visio for a while and what I like about it is the simplicity of it all and how the blocks were made for me. It was just a question of putting them in the right order.

When I found out about AutoCAD P&ID, I went crazy and downloaded it immediately. It has the same features as Visio (sorry for sounding like a newbie) but offered so much more in terms of project management, drawing management, revision management, etc.

Now, we are saving up in order to be able to purchase the P&ID version because I think that it will definitely benefit us.

As a small firm, I don't mind investing in such a software if it will save me time to do other things, like sales. We need to think about practicality and efficiency in the way we work and software helps us do that.

One more benefit is the final look of the P&ID. I'm no expert but having a standardized blocks and dimensions makes the P&ID look better, easier to follow and understand.

When I used the vanilla CAD, my blocks would look weird, some look bigger than others, etc... yes, newbie, I know... but with this software, I don't need to spend time and money on creating all of my blocks and attributes or anything of the sort.

My 2 cents

[mammajamma]

Dredging up an old thread. There isn't much input re: Autodesk P&ID on any forum I visit - is it not as popular as Autodesk hoped?

Anyway...our head of technology/senior partner went to AU last year and drank ALL the Kool-aid regarding the latest & greatest of everything. Now he wants to make the move to P&ID. I fully understand. It looks like a great program. Heck, it does some wonderful things. I've been in those classes/sales pitches myself and I do see the potential value.
HOWEVER. We have many engineers & designers with AutoCAD LT and vanilla AutoCAD, many of whom do some of their own editing. They may not start a flow drawing from scratch, but they do some erasing, text edits, and even more - in many cases quite competently. Which means that a designer creating drawings in P&ID would need to EXPORT the drawings to AutoCAD. It's not as simple as in AutoCAD where you can just set the default save to an earlier version. (and I can tell you right now that I'm not taking that call at the butt-crack of dawn to come in to do an export so Xyz Engineer can take the drawings with him on that 6am flight so he can work on them at a meeting.)
PLUS, doing that export means that when I would open his edited drawings, they will have lost the intelligence that was stripped off in the export. So I would then be stuck with "dumb" drawings to work on in my big fancy P&ID program.

At least that's the way it worked when I tried it out (v2012).

If anyone knows of a way of exporting and re-opening P&ID drawings that doesn't kill the intelligence, please share.