Use of the ISA-88 facility design strategy guides plant construction teams in optimizing the breakup of plant systems into a logical framework. This framework can be tailored to facilitate plant startup, commissioning and validation as well as and downstream expansion and reconfiguration.

When coupled with standardization, use of an ISA-88 modular design approach can be used to implement a series of plant features with lower costs of design and integration relative to traditional models. These features include:

Integrated 21CFR11 compliance strategies

Plant power failure detection and automated recovery schema

Consistent user interface design across multiple plant systems

Simpler implementation of PAT initiatives

Lower costs of design and integration

Systems designed and built using modular design approaches require less commissioning time in the following core areas.

I/O checkout

Alarm Testing

Security Testing

Permissive and Interlock Testing

With a strong integrated commissioning and validation strategy, much of the work completed during the commissioning effort may be leveraged toward validation. These strategies can allow plant teams to focus their effort and time on better process scale up and cycle development without lengthening timelines or compromising the rigor of the validation effort.