When undertaking massive building projects, billions of dollars can be lost through inefficiencies, delays, and poor management. The higher the stakes and complexity, the more essential it becomes to have precise planning and foresight.
Vaseem Khan, Vice President of Global Engineering at McDermott recently spoke at our 3DEXPERIENCE forum about the large scale projects that McDermott undertakes. McDermott is a 125 year-old Houston based company that creates and builds for the oil and gas industry including refineries, offshore platforms, and more.
Designing the Digital Work Stream
Like many other companies, McDermott finds itself at a critical crossroads – they must evolve their work processes to be lean, profitable, and to stay competitive. Khan reflected that McDermott is, “in the process of designing our work processes around various components of the 3DExperience platform and we use every one of these components to build a digital work stream which in a way is even more important during the design and implementation phase than the actual digital twin.”
Budget and Schedule Overruns
Many work flow systems of the past have reached the end of the life span. From a look at the numbers in the oil and gas industry as a whole, budget overruns and schedule overruns are rampant according to the latest Ernst & Young Report on Oil and Gas Megaprojects. Substantial amounts of money are being lost due to ineffective work processes. Couple that fact with the already tumultuous and highly competitive nature of the oil and gas industry, and it could spell disaster.
Silo Busting
An additional problem with the legacy systems is the natural tendency towards creating silos between different teams and the various functional areas of the project. Old habits can be hard to break and new processes often met with resistance. Khan opined,
“Let’s be real, these silos are not going to go away in a hurry- it’s because that’s the way people think. You know we are very tribal – we are engineers, we are procurement, we are construction people. That’s not going to change. That’s how we are. But now we can take information from these silos, from all of these buckets, and we can can agglomerate this data and we can ensure that this data sits in a central repository of information. The single source of truth.”
The move of work processes to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows for total transparency and real-time view of the project. Khan sums it up,
“What are we trying to do? From project management, planning, cost control, engineering – anything which is essential will go into the central engine, our work stream engine. And this is not something we are trying to do, what we envision to do, it’s what we are doing now. This gives everybody on the project or everyone who is not on the project (access). And this includes us, our vendors, our subcontractors, our CEO, real-time – all of us working from an absolute real – time view of the world.”
Watch the video to learn more about how McDermott is leveraging the capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to better develop and deliver massive project builds.
