I am curious about the CAD Drawings thing. This has been something I have been wondering for awhile. How does JBI do their designing? I can speak from experience that Engineering firms, which are all in competition with each other, all do things more or less the same way. They have to in order to compete. The whole plant is designed in a CAD system from the outset. Or maybe the CAD model is an output of Detailed Design, but the point is that nothing is constructed until this model is complete. They use simuilation tools, etc in order to size everything, but at the end of the day the initial set of drawings (the AFC or IFC drawings, ie. Issued For Construction or Authorized for Construction) all come from this elecronic model. Along with BOQ (Bills of Quantities), which is a list of quantities needed to build the plant. During construction it is refined and the result is the As-Buit`` drawings.
The use of CAD is actually quite amazing. I have been on a job site where the Progress for the day was downloaded to a CAD tool, incorporated in the model, and displayed to discuss strategies for the following day. In other words, the steel that was erected during a particular day was color-coded to appear in the model as the Progress for the day. The plant was shown in it`s current state of construction so that the construction team could plan work going forward. Very, very cool stuff....
So how does this apply to JBI? They could make the case that they are not big enough to hire an engineering firm to do their designing. And, JB is handy and they have a machine shop, so they did everything themselves. Bear in mind the following; Engineering is only typically 5% of the total Capital Cost of a plant. Inconsequential. How much have they spent so far? ALso consider: in order to build many units, they have to have a set of plans that the contractor and tradesmen can work from. It is necessary. Even if you are just doing R&D, one would think that it is beneficial to have a set of plans to document what you are doing. I have always had the impressiona that JBI was just building stuff without any thought to rollout. I think ti is going to cost them more now if they are trying to document it after-the-fact.
So what was the comment about this in the conference call?
Believe it or not, in the olden days (the 80's), they used to have actual models made of pipes on tabletops from which they modeled their plants. There was a whole clas of worker, a model-builder, that did this. The even maintained them, as modifications were made. They sat on table-tops... the technology of engineering is an ever-changing thing.
I would guess that JBI would have been better off to outsource the Engineering from the outset.
