Through my career, I worked for many EPCM projects. My expertise is supporting procurement systems. I supported Bechtel procurement system which is a in-house design ERP system, commercial systems such as COINs and Smartplant material, and now my preferred approach is no system.
Why no system?
First of all systems are expensive. There is always cost associated with database and UI license fees. Other than purchasing the system, company needs to hire consultant to perform customization. It could be time consuming to collect all the requirements, hence implement and roll out. Often the company needs to setup a team to perform the tasks.
I worked as a consultant in the past, to help client implement COINs systems. There are some companies adopt first base system, which is no customization required. The first base system is a good choice for small or medium sized company, the number of users is between 20 to 50. The core of COINs system is financial, it’s similar to SAP. These kind of systems are mandatory for the company, the company cannot live without it to produce month end and year end procedure and reports. Though the cost for procuring and implementing the system is high, normally the company will have to budget through annual IT expenses. For EPC company, it’s a different story. Most of the SCM groups in the EPC company don’t have any systems.
There are few big EPC companies have in-house design systems. Bechtel has their Procurement system called BPS (Bechtel Procurement tracking system). Flour , Amec and SNC all have their own in-house design systems. The main reason is EPC company has different process and very specific requirements for purchasing, expediting and logistics. It’s not like retail buy and sell the commodity items over and over again. There are specific attributes, timeline and deliverables need to be tracked during the project cycle. Also there are too many customization need to be implemented for the out of the box systems specifically for engineering design requirements. If the system can not fulfill the requirements, it might end up no one wants to use it, or it ends up with garbage in and garbage out. One project I have worked on, the home office used SAP, it’s only been used for approval purchase order and change order, nothing else can be entered or tracked. The reporting feature is none, to change anything or get data out of the system, they will need a ABAP developer to perform the task.
Most EPC project when it received go ahead basically has to start the work right way.There is no time to wait for the system ready. When I worked for Bechtel projects, we have to do lots of data fix after project started. It’s not possible if the project implemented SAP or any other accounting systems.
Most importantly, EPC projects are client facing. Each client has their own requirements and restrictions for the process and formatting. Again it’ll end up customization and time to implement the requirements.The time to adapt a system to a project might not fit project schedule requirement, on the other hand the cost for implementing could be high.
Where the No system idea from ?
For the past 15 years I supported Procurement systems, most of the time I have to write Excel or MS access utilities to bridging the gap between systems. One approach is to run the report from the system , then I ’ll write a script to read the report then convert them to some other report, hence the data can be imported into another system. It’s all because IT is the system owner, and discipline is the business owner, this model actually will not work to make the system function. IT can’t write the report , since they don’t understand the business requirements. And I can’t get access to the database, because I am not IT or work under IT, there is security issue and hard to get approved.For large data transaction, it worth to setup a team and implement a solution. For example, I had opportunity worked for stepping stone project which is implemented the solution to export Bantrel BPS transaction data to Client SAP. The project is long and big enough to sustain the effort to get the process implemented. Also client will pay for the cost. For other small projects, we ’ll just write a small MS access database, keep everything outside the system. So we have full control, and we can design any report or dashboard if project requires.
So I have been thinking is the system really necessary? For the past 10 years, the economy is sliding down in Alberta. Due to the cost of running project increasing, most large companies are downsized or looking for cost saving opportunities. There are lots of small EPC companies get awarded projects due to their lean structure and charge less overhead. However the drawback is they don’t have systems to manage their work, the client has to suffer from receiving messy paper work and hard to closeout the project. The common tool to use in the project is MS Excel. However the simple spreadsheet is not enough to track sophisticated scenarios. Excel could work, but needs some content and design to make it work for EPC projects.
Motivation
The motivation is from NoSQL. I am a big fun of data analyst. I took lots of machine learning, Web development courses. I have tried to build my own blog and web site in different ways. I like NoSQL database so much, it gave me the most influence for designing the process of running EPC SCM project no system.
The chart on the top illustrate the whole idea.
For EPC project, typically the process rely on folder structures as below.
▾ <Client>/
▾ Job#/
▾ Process/
▾ Technical/
▾ Packages/
▾ Electrical/
▾ EEL-001/
▾ EEL-002/
▾ EEL-003/
▾ Mechanical/
▾ EME-001/
▾ EME-002/
▾ EME-003/
▾ Piping/
▾ EPE-001/
▾ EPE-002/
▾ EPE-003/
▾ Instrument/
▾ EIC-001/
▾ EIC-002/
▾ EIC-003/
The team will share the above folder structure to perform work. Most documents need to be stored and tracked within it’s classified document architecture. These really similar as Firebase NOSQL structure. It provided lots of flexibility to expand or customize.
Project Design
I implemented the above illustrated project architecture for my previous project. It’s a EPC lump sum project, design and build three wellpads plus flowlines. There are total 35 POs, total line count is 1500 rows for purchased items.
I designed the Excel spreadsheet as a template to contain MRP, PO, Expediting and milestone information. I filled in Excel template for each package. Above the Excel Spreadsheets, I wrote a MS Access utility to read all the information from each Excel file under the PO package hierarchy. I also designed report in Excel, which will link to Access and retrieve all the information through the pre-built queries. The VBA code I wrote in this report will help to distribute the report to the designated person per their request.
The performance for the size of the project is acceptable. It ’ll take less than 2 minutes to read all the Excel data. The cost is 4 hours to write the MS access utility and sometime to design and tweak the reports based on client requirements. Overall compare to the projects I worked before with system, this is very efficient way to run EPC SCM project.
Why use Excel ?
MS Excel is great and provided rich user interface. Any UI system, you ’ll have to struggle with missing copy and paste function, drag down, auto increment number, or formatting features. I use Excel to templating my tables, plus it provided way for me to plug in formula and conditional formatting. I can standardize content and attributes, also I get flexibility to customize each package to add whatever feature I ’d like to.
MS Excel 2016 version added data feature, I can link table or query from MS access, it provided a way you can reproduce the results. So I designed all my reports and dashboard in a master Excel. Then I wrote small VBA macro to distribute the report to it’s destination with a dated name.
For Office 365 there are added features for linking and parsing Excel in a more efficient way and no need VBA or macro to make that happen.
The key to success on EPC SCM project
The key for EPC SCM project success is to capture information, and enrich the data. The report needs to be able to tell the story about the project, along with the timeline of the whole project cycle. We need to be able to answer “3W” (What we ordered ?, When we ’ll receive ?, Where are they?). Another important point is classification and categorization of the data,for running report and comparison of all kinds of data group.
Next step
I am a strong believer for keeping complicated things simple. With many years experience in this industry, complicated method won’t make things work, simple can easily get the user buy in and easily pickup by anybody. I am going to write up all the attributes I captured and reports I feel valuable for EPC projects, and post them in my future blog.