A Manufacturing Record Book (MRB) is a collection of documents intended to prove that the plant is constructed in full compliance with the project specification, the quality plan, and the contract. MRB is the best demonstration of the contractor experience, due diligence, and commitment.
MBR serves a dual purpose – for the plant handover and as a knowledge database for the plant's successive operation and maintenance. Depending on the project contract, information sharing may cover all project phases - from design to commissioning. MRB is a chronicle of the plant construction.
Given the importance of MRB, why don’t the desalination EPC contracts explicitly include MRB? The reason lies in its heavy impact on the project schedule and budget.
Manual collation of thousands of documents in MRB is highly error-prone, time-consuming, and expensive. It may cost millions of dollars and take months to complete and get approved.
If MRB is added to the contract, the final contractual payment (5% or higher) is conditioned by the customer’s approval of the MRB contents. For the desalination mega-project of 250 MLD, the above payment is over US$ 12 million. A delay in the MRB handover usually leads to penalties reducing the final payment.
For a client, MRB is the basis of maintenance planning, operation, and personnel training. The PDF-formatted MRB is poorly suited for these tasks as information about the equipment piece is dispersed over several chapters and documents. Re-ordering the document is not possible. It affects the quality of the plant O&M.
The above-mentioned MRB challenges do not exist in digital engineering as it works with data instead of documents. (The latter are just formatted data.) For instance, all the engineering, inspection, commissioning, and acceptance reports are compiled instantly by crenger.com from data stored in a single database.
Full data transparency and online access offered by digital engineering make the MRB approval by the customer unnecessary. In addition, the conventional MRB compilation may be entirely automated and easily tailored to individual customer requirements. However, from the digitization perspective, this task is completely redundant.
A much better alternative is the MRB browser with advanced information search because as a data collection, MRB will grow with the plant operation time and new data will have higher priority. The said browser differs from the project browser tailored to the project execution tasks; the handed-over information now has a ”read-only” status. At a minimum, the MRB browser interface shall provide access to the following information categories.
- product specifications, datasheets, and drawings
- operation, maintenance, and assembling instructions
- warranties, spare parts, and troubleshooting instructions
- inspection and test reports, certificates of compliance
- operation sequences related to a specific equipment item