Dow Chemical Project Productivity Program Manager Deborah McNeil believes owners are ultimately responsible for driving project productivity improvement for the industry.
“Why? Because in the end, the projects are ours,” McNeil said, addressing Petrochemical Updates’ Refining Capital Projects Conference & Exhibition held recently in Houston. “We have the money and we write the contracts, so we’re in the driver’s seat there.
“Owner teams still need to be staffed with competent members, be aligned with EPC firms and have owner core competencies to achieve project productivity.”
Discussing how owners could significantly improve craft and field productivity, McNeil said she is often asked why more progress hasn’t been made by owners to drive technology solutions into the project industry.
“There are multiple internal barriers in an owner’s organization that have to be overcome to accomplish that,” she said. “Although projects should be important to us, our true value as owners is a long-term cost of ownership of that facility. So operations maintenance are more important because, in the end, they actually spend more money.”
Driving project productivity improvements within an owner’s organization is a cross-functional problem, McNeil explained. “Engineering cannot solve it without procurement, and procurement cannot fix it without construction,” she said, explaining how input from all departments is required to eliminate challenges to productivity. The needs of operations and maintenance personnel, McNeil added, must also be clearly defined in order to maximize productivity improvement.
In the past year, McNeil said, Dow has engaged a multifunctional team to under-stand the current state of technology.
“One of the challenges facing owners is that we have stepped away from technology development,” she said. “We need to reintroduce ourselves to the under-standing of what’s possible.”
Dow previously operated 12 different maintenance systems, McNeil said.
“Feeding data in a consistent, systemic way to 12 different maintenance systems didn’t have a lot of value for us,” she said. “We haven’t worked through all of our data management and change management technology challenges, but we’re now on a global, single maintenance system.”
Dow is currently engaged in an Information Material Flow Optimization Project (IMFOP) designed to significantly improve craft field and shop productivity by identifying obstacles that impede productivity.
“We’ve set a vision,” McNeil said. “Across the lifecycle, we like to input data once. Whoever else might need that piece of data downstream should be able to get it without having to retype it.
“We spent millions of dollars retyping the same data, the same project number. When you start to dollarize that, real money starts to get on the table.”
In order to “straighten up the data,” McNeil said steps are being taken to analyze and simplify Dow’s data management practices.
“If we generate data that nobody needs, we’re going to stop generating it,” she said. “We’ve made these templates very complex, and, like contracts, I’m not sure that anybody’s even reading 90 percent of what’s on that template. We want to simplify our systems. We want to say, ‘OK, can we collapse all that?’ And then we would like progress reporting to come out of it naturally, not to cause extra work.”
McNeil said she recognizes the difficulty in convincing stakeholders in a short-term project who are focused on owner goals to embrace technology implementation. A large part of this challenge, she said, is to align success measurement of the ultimate goal of the project with the ultimate goal of the long-term facility.
The bottom line, McNeil said, is all stakeholders want safe, low-cost projects with high-quality results. “It’s been a whole year of talking across functions, understanding what people really need,” she said. “But we’re making progress.”
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