As chemical engineers advance in their fields they often find that their non-engineering responsibilities increase with their salaries. Somewhere along the line they may become liable for the safety of an entire team, lab or plant. In these cases, it is of the utmost importance that engineers arrange for the preparation of suitable documentation and training materials for their chemical equipment and operations. It's no secret that regulatory bodies such as the Occupational Safety and Hazard Association (OSHA), the International Organization for Standards (ISO) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) insist on nothing less than complete compliance in these areas. Thus engineers must ensure that their process manuals, documenting methods and educational materials are consistently up to par.

With these responsibilities in mind, today's chemical engineer must provide for a wide array of conditions. This includes a flexible, easily updatable format for documentation and training, rapid accessibility to infrequently-used information, a means of acquiring and transferring necessary information in an easy-to-understand fashion and, finally, they must provide assurance that the quality of operations will continue after they've moved onto other projects. As a means to achieving these goals, engineers need to ask themselves a number of questions. First, does their documentation address proper and safe operations as well as emergency situations? Second, is the documentation easily available, understandable and in a format that allows for operators to use it quickly? And, third, are operations properly prepared in the case of both emergency shutdowns and scheduled shutdowns?

All of these responsibilities can add up to a major headache. Engineers can attempt to tackle these tasks by themselves, or pass the headache along to other staff. A better option may be to outsource this function to a facilitating company with expertise in the field. Recently, facilitating companies have begun streamlining the documentation and training process through the use of structured information technology. This entails collecting all available resource materials, interviewing those knowledgeable about the operation, photographing or videotaping the pertinent machines or processes in the operation, preparing focus maps to check with company officials and then meeting with company experts to approve or revise these materials and tweak the appropriate details. The completed documentation and training materials are then delivered in a flexible format that can be easily transferred to a computer-based, Web-based or even print-based training program, allowing for a greater array of training options. The idea is that through a structured approach, the facilitating company can gather data faster so engineers can put it to use immediately. In addition, the resulting documentation is designed to be more flexible so it can be used for many purposes.

Ideally, outsourcing the preparation of documentation and training materials, can take some of the heat off chemical engineers and let them get back to what they do best, engineering.

Source: What Keeps Engineers Awake at Night: Advances in Documentation and Training
Bill Biach
Chemical Engineers Resource Page, June 2001
http://www.cheresources.com/awake.shtml