Case Study: Eskom digitalizes Matimba Power Station with Hexagon PPM

Pilot project shows how to handle brownfield projects more efficiently

Eskom, one of the world’s largest utilities, needed a better way to manage decades of engineering records for its Matimba Power Station in South Africa. Much of the plant’s documentation existed only in paper, scanned files, PDFs, and other unstructured formats, making it difficult to find, validate, and connect information for operations and maintenance work. Eskom worked with Hexagon PPM using SmartPlant Fusion and Leica TruView as part of a digital plant refresh pilot.

Hexagon PPM helped digitize and organize the plant’s legacy documentation by identifying relevant files, extracting tag data, creating document-to-tag relationships, and linking everything to photorealistic TruView scans of the facility. In just four weeks, the project integrated previously siloed documents, made information searchable and navigable, and enabled maintenance staff to access related documentation by clicking on equipment hotspots in the 3D plant view. The result was a practical blueprint for digitizing brownfield assets and a foundation for easier turnaround planning and future engineering data management.

Eskom