TeamWork Discussion

Open Letter to Process Plant Personnel - A Gap Analysis

2009-05-11T07:05:00.001-07:00

To: IT Managers, Plant Managers, Department Managers, and members of your Maintenance, Engineering and Operations Teams

From: The TeamWork Group's Maintenance Management System Developers

Subject: Maintenance Management System (MMS) Requirements and a Gap Analysis between what you have now and what you could have now

Date: May, 2009

In this communication we trace the following:

Review of general needs for Asset and Work management in a plant environment, including maintenance (routine, preventive, predictive and turnaround) and capital projects
Current situation at your plant, along with a discussion of gaps between the current situation and the desired needs

5 BIG General Requirements for Plant-wide Asset and Work Management

Integrate with condition monitoring (CM) systems
Manage the entire work cycle and associated data
Manage all asset history and provide reliability calculations
Manage general and specific plant information
System support and configuration of the MMS to suit evolving needs

We now discuss each of these requirements in more detail. First we state why these are crucial to the operations of the plant, and then we perform a comparative gap analysis to point out the issues that may exist in your operations and maintenance environment.

Integration Links to Condition Monitoring (CM) Systems

A process plant's assets are the core entities that must be kept in top working condition in order to ensure that the returns on the investment (ROI) of the company, and its investors, are maximized. This means that maintenance work, which ensures the long term viability of each asset, is a core function that must be managed. For this reason, each plant has a number of systems that monitor the operating conditions of assets. Vibration monitoring is used to monitor the performance of rotating equipment such as compressors and pumps. Leak measurement systems are used to measure leaks of hydrocarbon gases from valves and fittings. Corrosion measurement systems help the engineering department to ensure that the piping and vessels maintain a thickness that allows them to operate safely and efficiently. Inspection systems provide a means for recording salient operating factors associated with each asset. An effective work management system links with each of these (CM) systems and provides a means to readily initiate the work cycle by creating work requests for review and approval by management.

Work Cycle Management

The work cycle that starts with a work request and finishes with a satisfied customer (in Operations, Safety or Inspection) is seamlessly managed in a single, user-friendly system. This means that proposed work is:

Reviewed by supervision - if it is approved, then it is
Planned by planners, after which it may be
Scheduled to be worked, unless it is waiting for
Materials procurement based on plans and estimates, after which it is
Executed by the field, then
QA'd (Quality-Assurance) by Inspectors, and if OK then
Accepted by Operations or Inspection. During this entire process,
Costs are tracked, including the estimated, budgeted, committed, expended, incurred, planned, earned and forecasted costs.

Each of these critical facets of the work cycle, including change management, must be managed. This management should occur naturally within a single continuous work flow system. Documents, communications and approvals associated with the work should, likewise, be monitored and tracked.

Asset Reliability and History Management

The work management process ensures that work is defined, tracked and accomplished in an efficient manner. The data collected during the work cycle must be analyzed constantly using statistics-based analytics. The results of these real-time analyses provide management with a believable and sustainable basis upon which they can make their decisions. Such as: Should a heat exchanger be replaced during the next turnaround, or should it undergo repairs? Is a pump that routinely suffers from cavitation incorrectly designed for its task? Should it be replaced?

Plant Information Management

The engineering data that is necessary for maintenance and operations analysts to make quick, informed decisions should be available quickly to all people who make decisions in the plant. This includes the most recent design calculations, specifications, documentation and drawings for each asset and process system in the plant. A complete plant management system provides an object-oriented documentation management system. This system ensures that asset-related data is always available to the planners, the field personnel, the inspectors, operations, etc.

System Maintenance and Support

The computer system (in this age of the web, this sounds like an archaic term, does it not?) that you use must be responsive to your needs. This is an often-overlooked, yet extremely critical, aspect of managing your plant. The long-term impact and cost of not paying due attention to the capability and capacity of your MMS tool as well as your solution vendor to meet your needs is measured in the millions of dollars. Study a few of the root causes of unexpected plant equipment breakdowns. They can often be traced to the fact that inadequate attention was paid to the warning signs that were being collected in the work cycle. Many CMMS vendors are companies with thousands of disparate customers in different industries. They maintain a wish list of improvements. Your foreman's great idea has to percolate through many internal levels of corporate bureaucracy, in your company, to the IT team that has access to the wish list. The IT folks dutifully add the requests to the list - but do not have the passion to explain the reasoning behind or the need for the wish list item. Sadly, the people that should have input into the improvements in an MMS are often the ones that are ignored and told to 'just use the system'. If they complain, they are branded as non-team players and troublemakers. Our experience is that these are the people that we should be listening to. These are the folks that are on the front-line and that are intimately familiar with the processes, good and bad. These are the people that we ignore, and then wonder why we need to replace yet another system.

In order to enable users and system designers to interact with each other, your software supplier must have people ready to work with your users. This often means having someone on-site with your people on a daily basis to better 'feel their pain'. This is a, seemingly costly, process that pays great dividends in user satisfaction, as well as more complete usage of your system. A quick review of the number of spreadsheets in use at your site is a good indicator of the sheer volume of data that is NOT being managed in your system. Too often, corporate system managers simply ignore these compelling facts on the ground and take cover behind the products and services of big-name companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle and others. Not only is the product and service package from these companies expensive, they simply serve the needs of the system managers. Business users get the short end of the deal. Try to avoid this when selecting your vendor. Ensure that they have a proven track record of customer support - in your 'trenches'. They should be familiar with your business processes. That should be the over-riding issue - as opposed to their claim to being a CMMS or an ERP.

How does your process get managed today? What are the gaps that must be bridged to a more efficient process?

The main issues, that we have discussed: Integration of CM Systems, Work Cycle, Asset and Reliability, Plant Information Management and System Maintenance and Support, are all so core to an operating plant that they are all being done today in your plant - using a variety of tools. We now briefly review the typical scenarios that we have encountered and suggest a better way to streamline each of these processes.

Smart Linking to Condition Monitoring (CM) Systems

Many specialty system vendors specialize in the supply of a variety of CM tools. You probably have vibration analysis systems, leak measurement systems, inspection system in your plant already. These systems are supplied by companies that also provide the hardware that generates the actionable data. However, look a little closer. Is the data from these systems processed automatically? Will the results of a leak detection process, for instance, automatically trigger the creation of a work request to fix a valve? Typically, this process is heavily manual. The results of the leak detection are sent to the Planners. Planners create a spreadsheet that is then reviewed. Then the planner creates a work plan in the planning system. These are 3 steps that require three human interventions in what could be a simple and streamlined, business-rule driven process.

Your MMS could be configured to poll the CM systems and, based on actionable thresholds, be able to produce work requests that are the start of your work management cycle. In addition, your MMS should alert your engineering and reliability people if any work request has been created for an asset on a frequency that is greater than the PM frequency. This gives them a heads-up and an opportunity to review and analyze the issue.

What is the cost of manually bridging this gap in information flow? What are the consequences or errors due to re-entry of asset information?

We'll leave that analysis to your business processes. What we can say is that The TeamWork Group's TeamWork 2k system has been designed with a strong awareness that the systems operating in your plant should work together, like a team. TeamWork 2k's Integration Manager provides many tools that help to integrate data flows between these systems and your primary work and asset management system. Your business rules for managing the flow between systems are also easily integrated into these processes. Imagine the convenience of having your major data islands all connected with each other. Of course the security concerns associated with regulatory programs such as SOX and TSX are addressed. In addition, we ensure that a security framework ensures that each member of you team has access to data that is appropriate to their (business-rule based) position.

Conclusions: Teamwork 2k is a great addition to the tools that you already use, and will help you to replace scores of spreadsheets and ad hoc databases by consolidating their data into a single, user friendly database that is accessible by a web-based interface.

Cradle to Grave Work Cycle Management

Current MMS systems come in similar flavors. They have data stored in a database. The Work orders (or notifications) are the typical mode for tracking work. As work progresses through its various phases, it is left to the user to manually change these phases. Scope change management is not an automatic process - rather, it relies on users to state that a change is occurring.

A business rule-based system that automatically changes the status of work orders should be implemented. This would ensure that arbitrary changes in status based on the data entry person's limited perspective will not skew the data in the system. Likewise, business rule based change management system is a huge benefit, as it enables automated tracking of changes, without imposing an additional burden of data entry on your users. This data is collected, and analyzed, automatically.

The typical work cycle weaves its way from initiator to supervisors to department leads to planning to field execution to QA and customer acceptance. Each of these points should have opportunities for the recording and storing of pertinent comments as well as attached site photos, equipment drawings, sketches, faxes, videos, etc. An audit trail of the decisions made during any aspect of the work cycle should be readily available to your team for review and analysis.

Intuitively, we know that scheduling of work is a critical component of the work cycle. However, systems currently in use are woefully lacking in this area. Typically, the solution is an add-on scheduling system that is not an integrated component of the work management system. While these are scheduling tools are admirable in their own right, badly designed 'bridges' and data transfers to and from these systems from current MMS's result in poor models of the maintenance backlog. In addition, the use of these scheduling tools means using schedulers, which means more cost to the maintenance budget. This is a very expensive way to go. Especially when one understands that scheduling is heavily rule-based. If these rules are built into your system, this results in a streamlined component of your work flow process. Your planner's plans simply flow into the schedule when they are completed, approved and materials and resources, human and equipment, are ready to perform the work. Your work execution staff will now get the work done as scheduled!

A huge asset in your project management team is your Execution staff. These people are your best source of excellent and timely field data. The 3 things you want to know each day are:

Are there any problems - especially safety issues? This includes reasons for delayed work.
Who did what and for how long? Another word for this is timekeeping! They can dramatically improve the accuracy of this process.
What progress was made? This should be reported as a remaining duration for the task at hand. This leads directly to an evaluation of earned value.

Too often, during the execution phase, all of the details that the field provides are lost because there simply is no workstation or process available to foremen and craftspeople to report their knowledge back to the system. We see this as a major disconnect. So many decisions are based on the situation at the 'work face' that collecting information directly from it should be a major priority. We seem to be afraid of involving field personnel in the data gathering process, while we completely depend on them to do the work efficiently. The prevailing approach seems to be: Give them just the information that they need to do the work. Our experience has shown that involving the field simply helps you to improve the opportunities for more successful outcomes.

TeamWork 2k is a work management system. You can estimate, then budget, plan and schedule your work - starting from drawings or from issues encountered in the plant. Once the work is being executed, many tools within TeamWork 2k enable your workforce to provide timely feedback. When this feedback is processed and presented to, or accessed by, the management team, it becomes a solid basis for decisions that affect the project, maintenance plan or turnaround.

Conclusions: TeamWork 2k provides a real, cost-saving, opportunity to bring all of the work management cycle into one, efficient and focused, process.

Reliably run your Assets

Your inspection department collects information about the rotating and fixed equipment in the plant. This information should constantly be processed to ensure that there no hidden patterns that are leading to nasty surprises. Currently, you depend on the re-entry of this information into Excel spreadsheets in order to produce Reliability data that provide your engineers that data that they need to recommend appropriate solutions.

TeamWork produces Weibull and other asset KPI calculations for each asset based on data that is collected within the work management process. This ensures a timely and more accurate process for managing, computing and reviewing reliability data.

Conclusions: TeamWork 2k could well help to reduce the number of data islands that exist. Reliability calculations can be modeled within this work management system.

Plant Information Manager - your PIM

Where is your plant engineering specification data today? Is the electrical, instrumentation, piping, rotating equipment all in one system? This is likely not the case. Typically, we find this data in different Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. These are disjointed methods for managing this critical data. Line lists may exist in an Excel spreadsheet. Likewise, your electrical line data is also in spreadsheets. A disparate and department-focused system for managing these critical plant data elements is a recipe for ongoing problems.

TeamWork 2k, flexible database and consistent reporting framework can easily be made to replace these disparate systems - on integrate seamlessly with them. In doing so, your data is available to the people doing the work. This ensures a more efficient workplace and a huge cost savings for the plant.

Conclusions: Consider TeamWork 2k, your work management system as the repository for all of your plant information - including OEMS, electrical, instrumentation, piping, rotating equipment, etc.

Software System Management

Observe your current ERP and CMMS systems. Are they responsive to your day to day needs? Things that we hear often are that they are simply not responsive at all. It takes years to implement these systems. When the budget for deploying these systems runs out, the expensive consultants are sent packing. The result is that the systems are left with little support. As these systems are not work and asset focused - usually, they pay more attention to accounting issues - they are not appropriate for managing work and assets. Each plant has its own work culture, jargon and other 'hot button' issues. These expensive ERPs and CMMSs are not easily modified to adhere to the plant's needs. Instead, they are deployed in a way that attempts to change the business process of the plant.

TeamWork 2k was developed with the knowledge that each client user has a business process that has kept them in business for a long time and that is generally sound. TeamWork 2k can easily be configured to assimilate the business rules of your plant and to be an asset to the work management process, as well as your tracking of compliance and other maintenance measures. Add to this the fact that all of this functionality resides in a single system and the benefits simply continue to mount.

The TeamWork Group also provides a complete hosting service for the software that you need. This means that you can have complete access to all of these tools and features without the need to install the system on company computers. What does this mean for your users? Here are a few benefits:

Complete and constant vendor support
Reduced need for long upgrade and update cycles
Hugely reduced cost of management of the system
Web-based access
More robustness and constant availability than when using in-house resources.

Conclusions: This is a great improvement over current intelligent system paradigms.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this post. If you need the services described here, please visit our website: www.teamworkgroup.com and contact me at cpmonteiro@teamworkgroup.com

Live Scheduling

2009-04-20T11:34:00.001-07:00

Live Scheduling

The train is leaving the station. Are we on it?

Imagine a world where we can stop things from happening until we are ready for them to happen. Not ready to catch that flight? It can wait. Not ready for dinner? It can wait.

Clearly, these scenarios are non-starters. The rest of the world continues on its preset schedule. Why then, are we so willing to accept the existence of an out-of-date-schedule? Common excuses provided include: "The data is not ready". "We are waiting to hear from the contractor". "The equipment vendor has not got back to us as yet". "We are working on the man-loading". "The logic is not right, yet". Are these familiar? Are people working on the project? Is progress being made? If so, then you should be working to the plan. And this plan should be 'scheduled'. If you are not doing so, you could be held accountable, by your company, for mismanaging company resources.

Does this sound too severe? In the light of recent examples of poor management of funds and associated risks, it would seem that a little more accountability and a little less freedom with company and investor funds is not a bad thing.

In this article we discuss various aspects of managing projects and plant maintenance turnarounds. In particular, we review the barriers that are commonly placed in path of project visibility and address the various tools that can be used to attain the desired level of transparency, accuracy and timeliness in project reporting and analysis.

Time and Money - the twin company resources

The two primary aspects of project management, after safety, are the management of time and money. The discipline of project controls is designed to manage these two critical aspects of projects and turnarounds. If you can reduce the time (i.e. duration) and the money (i.e. cost) of your project, you can save money and this is considered a good thing. The project manager (PM) that consistently brings projects in ahead of schedule and under budget is a hero and a valuable person in the organization. A major tool that the PM needs is a clear view of the planned costs and schedule from the outset of the project. Before corporate managers approve a project, they too need to know the proposed budgeted and the schedule timeline for the project. The budget and schedule may initially take the form of a planned expenditure curve. This is also known as a cash flow curve and when the cumulative cash flow is plotted against time, the shape of the curve approximates the letter 'S' and is often referred to as the S-Curve. This Planned Cost S-curve is a single diagrammatic representation of the cost and schedule of a project. In order to effectively produce such a curve, all components of the project's work must be included in the process. In many construction-related projects, the major phases are Engineering, Procurement and Construction. For this reason, these are also known as EPC projects. A discussion of how to produce a plan and a schedule for EPC projects and Maintenance Turnarounds follows. We discuss ways to overcome the common pitfalls and obstacles to the time production of a live schedule.

Staging a Successful Project

A project evolves through a predictable sequence of stages. The transition from one stage to the next is called a Stage Gate. The project undergoes a metamorphosis when it transitions through the gate between one stage and the next. During the Scope Development and Approval stage, there is very little in the way of project detail. This lack of detailed information makes it difficult to estimate the cost of the project as well as its duration. Scope developers and estimators prepare an estimate that is based on broad parameters. For example, if the project is to build a pipeline for 100 miles, the costs of previously completed pipeline projects may be used as a basis for estimating. If the project is to install a heat exchanger, the estimator can use a table from a reference such as Richardson's or Mean's to estimate the time and relative cost of the project. This type of estimate is known as the 10% estimate. This is because there is 10% or less of the detail that the project will eventually have following the engineering phase. Management approves the project based on the costs and schedule that they see in this stage. The amount approved becomes the Original Budget. The timeline is the original baseline. Any changes that occur in the project that result in changes to the budget must be approved as a change authorization request (CAR). The Revised Budged is the aggregate of the original budget and the changes. Likewise, changes may impact the baseline and result in a revised baseline. Some companies refer to the budget and schedule as the target budget and target schedule.

The Engineering Stage kicks off the process of detailed engineering. During this phase, detailed design work results in the production of detailed drawings and analyses. Halfway through engineering, it may be possible to create what is commonly referred to as the 30% Estimate. This estimate, with its extra detail provides a more accurate view of the projected costs of the project. Management uses this new information to modify the project budget and schedule - usually by changing its scope. These changes result in a changed schedule as well. The Maintenance Turnaround equivalent of the Engineering stage is the Scope Development Phase. This occurs during the year prior to the major turnaround.

Toward the end of the Engineering stage the drawing's are 'Issued for Construction' (IFC). At this time a 100% estimate provides a much more accurate estimate of costs and duration. By this time, management may have already committed to the procurement of some equipment and materials that have a long-lead time for fabrication or manufacturing and delivery.

The Construction stage ushers in the contractors and vendors that are responsible for building the project. The input provided by these organizations further contributes to the fine-tuning of the budget and the schedule. In Maintenance Turnarounds this is known as the Maintenance Period.

While construction proceeds during the Execution stage, and maintenance proceeds through the maintenance period, the progress provided and the field conditions encountered cause a new and accurate schedule to be available virtually every day. This is a live schedule that shows the way that work is unfolding each day and each shift, if needed. A Baseline schedule is maintained for the project. This is the approved budget and schedule. As the project or turnaround progresses, additional scope is discovered and included in the project based on field considerations. These changes are reflected on a 'current' schedule. A comparison between the current schedule and the baseline shows variances that may need further approvals by management. You company's business rules determine the processes for managing the documentation, approval and inclusion of scope changes in the current plan.

During each of the project stages a new schedule emerges. However, we prefer to see all of these schedules as the same schedule - just in different stages - just like the project itself. If we maintain the schedule in the same environment (software, database, etc.) then we can have the baseline to track the evolution of the project though it's multiple stages. In the next section, we discuss the components of an integrated scheduling system.

Components of an Integrated Project Scheduling tool

Each project is broken down into component pieces according to a variety of breakdowns. The WBS or work breakdown structure is the most common tool for coding aspects of the project. For estimating and planning purposes, it is common practice to break a project down into work packages. An estimate work package is not the same as a plan work package. An estimate package is focused on materials (commodities), their quantities and unit rate costs for them. Labor costs are included based on standard installation rates. Plan packages, on the other hand are focused on the physical installation at the site. An integrated estimating and scheduling tool allows the costs of an estimate to be spread accurately along the duration of work items in the plan.

While a project progresses, there may be changes in the numbers associated with the project. These include the following:

Quantity of materials (commodities)
Unit rate cost of materials (commodities)
Unit rate cost of labor
Productivity
Duration of the work
Physical Quantity to be completed

Changes to any of these items results in changes to the cost and the schedule. An integrated project scheduling tools provides the means to track changes to these items, document them, get them approved and display their impact graphically as changes to the baseline and current target cost as well as completion dates for the work inclusive of the changes.

Changes - be aware of them and track them

Knowing the source of each change makes tracking the reasons for the changes a much easier and accurate and believable process. This tracking should occur automatically, without the need for onerous data entry and approval cycles. For example, if the client's field manager asks the foreman to work on an out of scope valve in the vicinity of the in scope work that is being done, the foreman may simply deploy his people to do the work (safely!). The system should allow a new work item and work package, if needed, to be added by the foreman or his/her timekeeper. Adding a work item 'on-the-fly' is critical in order to allow the plan to accurately reflect the actual work as it is done in the field - rather than being forced into the pre-built schedule. Think about this for a moment! We are saying here that a schedule should accurately reflect what is going on in the field. This is not a crazy idea. Yet how often do we see a schedule change due to field input? The weekly or monthly report that includes the schedule simply continues to report progress based on the baseline schedule. It pretends that what is happening in the field is not important enough to be reflected on the schedule. No wonder that the field often gets the work done despite, and independently of, the schedule. The foremen resort to Excel spreadsheets to outline the work for their crews and to record their progress. A disconnect grows each day that the field is disconnected from the plan and the schedule.

The main issue is to have a system be a reflection of the work as it is happening. By doing this well, it can also serve as tool for management to see where things are really going. In addition, the field is now co-opted into maintaining a much more accurate plan and schedule. This means that they are more likely to actually use the schedule to help them in their daily what-if analyses. Such as: 'Should we work 4 weeks of 12 hour days to crash the schedule?" or "Should we simply hit the critical path work for the next 4 weeks and 2 12 hour shifts?". Again, a live, and living, schedule is a tool that many projects are simply not using today.

Remove the Obstacles

Why is this? Too often, on the scheduling 'island', schedulers see their mission as to simply produce a schedule on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. They are simply auditors of the project execution. They are not integrated into the actual execution process. This is an expensive way to go. The scheduling function in this scenario is an overhead that the project cannot afford. The cost-effectiveness of a schedule and the scheduling process should be proved every day during the execution phase. When the field personnel use the schedule to help them deploy their resources and to report progress, then the schedule is doing its work for the project. This is a desirable outcome, and the way that it is achieved is by closely incorporating field input into the plan and the schedule that is derived from the plan. In real terms, this means that the plan and the schedule are owned by all of the people on the project - and not simply by the scheduling group of 'expert' schedulers. Once it is clear to field personnel that they are integral to the plan and schedule creation and maintenance, they will provide the best and most accurate and useful input into the schedule. This input results in far more accurate earned and actual data for each of the work items and work packages in the project's scope of work. When this data is rolled up to the project-level summary report, management has believable data that is built on, effectively, real-time input from the field.

It just does not get any better than this! No PM wants to live in a dream world. Not for long, anyway. The timely field will keep the project grounded, every time.

Takeaways for Live Scheduling

We now summarize the salient issues involved with Live Scheduling.

Always have a schedule - no matter what the phase of the project. As the project evolves into its various stages, the plan and the schedule that is based on the plan should be 'fleshed-out' with detail. Use the 'do not schedule' flag to prevent work items and work packages from being included in the schedule before they are ready to be included (ex. while you are building the detailed schedule), or after you create a more detailed schedule.
From inception of the project, establish a regimen of a daily schedule. This means you collect progress and actual data daily. It also means that the schedule is computed daily from the plan. This ensures that it is a living entity that the engineering, procurement, maintenance and construction personnel can use each day as they execute the work.
Ensure that change management is built into the planning process by implementing company business rules. This ensures that the plan and schedule will always reflect what is happening in the field - and not just what was planned to happen. Do not be afraid of changes! They will happen anyway.
Integrate your timekeeping with the plan. If your actuals are charged to the work in the plan they will, by definition, be accurate. The use of work orders or WBS codes in the timekeeping process is the single biggest area where bad data is collected in an organized way into the system. Using your plan and schedule in this way ensure accuracy in an area of heavy data acquisition - which means that this is an inexpensive way to get great data.
Provide your field supervision (foreman, superintendents) with tools to let them view the current live plan and schedule as well as enter the latest field conditions into the system. This integrates them more closely with the project process. This results in better information, more quickly and in both directions - to the field and from the field. Amazingly, this also reduces their workload (no timesheets to be filled!) and helps them to 'work smart' by leveraging the information that they have into change management, progress reporting, timekeeping as well as workforce deployment for the next day's or next shift's work.

OK - Now we know what must be done - what tools do we need?

The TeamWork Group has built a suite of tools that are configurable to each client's business rules while ensuring adherence to conventionally accepted project management practices as outlined in various PMI publications.

The TeamWork 2k suite of solutions includes the following:

myCosts - This is a WBS-based tool for managing the quantity and unit rate based estimating process from take-off from drawings to the approval process to the creation of a budget. Change management is included in the module. In addition, this module proves the means for tracking cost commitments and cost expenditures in order to provide an accurate picture of project status. Links are available to 'move' the budgeted labor, equipment, materials and contracted costs to the plan in order to obtain a time-based spread of the budgeted costs. Progress from the budget can also be sent to the plan and schedule or be sent back from the plan to the budget - based on business rule implementation.
myPlans - This is a work package-based planning system. It provides the means for the execution team to break the project down into chunks of work (work packages) that can be planned and scheduled as logically integrated sequences of work. These work packages reflect the way that the work will be done. Planners plan each of the work packages. The built-in scheduling engine schedules and, optionally, levels the limited resources to produce a workable schedule based on business rules that govern prioritization, work type, work in progress, etc. Field personnel access their daily work list from the system and use the system to provide daily progress on work done. Built-in Change Management ensures that all changes are assimilated and documented and available for analysis.
eWorkforce - This tool is focused on managing and tracking work done by the workforce on the work items in the work plans in the project. Links between eWorkforce and the work that is planned in myPlans ensures that time (actual or incurred hours) is accurately charged to real open work items. Each contractor that contributes personnel to the workforce may use the system. In addition, time data may be imported into the system from contractor timekeeping systems.
myProjects - This tool is designed to be a quick query tool that permits project managers and other corporate and project personnel to gain a quick view of the health of a project. Quick access to project reports is available. Also, drilldowns into the detailed levels of a project are available.

The TeamWork Group has worked hard to ensure that companies that are in need of this technology can easily access it. We have done this by leveraging the internet to help you and your company to easily and securely gain access to the web-based tools that you need to get your work done efficiently and with the least amount of wasted time. You will not need to get approval from your IT group in order to install our software on your system. The only tool that you need is your internet browser.

We are also available to answer your questions - in a number of ways including all of the usual ones: email, phone, IM, SMS texting, etc.

You will find us via our website: www.teamworkgroup.com.

TeamWork 2k and Primavera and Microsoft Project

2009-02-09T15:20:00.001-08:00

Note: All trademarks and trade names used in this discussion are the property of their respective owners.

Introduction

In this post, we discuss the roles that these three systems play in organizations that use them. We review the benefits of each tool and how, together, they provide the user with more options. We also discuss exactly how TeamWork 2k communicates with Primavera and MS Project - including how it sends data to and receives data from Primavera and MS Project. As the discussion proceeds, we pay special attention to potential problem areas in transferring data and also point you to more effective ways of enhancing the TeamWork 2k to Primavera and/or MS relationship in your organization.

What is Primavera?

As there are many new business people entering our business environment, we spend a little time here discussing what, exactly, Primavera is. Primavera is a software package that performs scheduling calculations. It was created by Primavera Systems. In 2008, Oracle acquired the company together with its software tools. The most commonly used tools are called P3, P3e, P5 or P6. You can think of these as different versions with P6 being the newest version. Primavera is, justifiably, considered to be the industry standard tool for scheduling of projects. It has by far the most users of any scheduling system on the market. Microsoft Project is its closest competitor. The primary physical manifestations of a Primavera schedule are the graphical outputs that it provides - both on-screen and in reports. These include the bar charts (also known as Gantt charts), logic diagrams (also known as PERT charts), time-scaled logic diagrams (which combine the bar charts with logic), resource histograms (which plot resource usage against time) and cumulative resource curves (also known as s-curves). The tailor-ability of these graphics in Primavera is powerful and allows end-users to directly affect how they would like their outputs to appear.

How about Microsoft Project?

MS project has steadily evolved over the years into a robust and full-featured scheduling tool. It now provides similar capabilities to P6. The same type of outputs are available from MS Project as are available from P6. Some people prefer the functionality of MS project over P6. It has a more 'Excel-like' feel to it that appeals to the legions of Excel users out there.

Tell me something about TeamWork 2k

TeamWork 2k is a business tool that has evolved over the last 20 years. It has its roots in interfacing with Primavera and MS Project. Early on, it became obvious to us that businesses such as process plants (refineries, mills, utilities, chemical plants) required a high degree of adherence to a business process while managing their work. This work includes maintenance, inspection and capital projects work. Plants perform their work on assets. It is imperative that the history of all of the work that is done on these assets be available, in a single database, for use as a reference during the life cycle of these assets. TeamWork 2k has developed as an asset-focused tool that enables all of the work, including routine maintenance, turnaround maintenance, preventive maintenance, capital work, to be scoped, estimated, planned, executed and tracked in a single system. This powerful database is a strategic weapon that the plant has against a number of major and problematic issues. These include:

Lack of adherence to business rules by temporary personnel hired to help out;
Lack of a standard process for managing all asset-based work;
Lack of a system that connects to other condition-monitoring (CM) systems in-house;
Lack of a uniform system for reporting on the status of assets that are being worked on;
Lack of a system that improves the quality of data, thus reducing the time that people spend re-entering this data;

These may seem relatively inconsequential, but the price to a plant of not paying attention to these simple issues is enormous. Already, we have seen that data relating to projects and turnarounds that were scheduled in P6 are not available in the asset database where the routine maintenance work was tracked. This provides a potential for huge disconnects in the plant managers' view of an asset's reliability. Safety is also a potential problem here.

Simply put, TeamWork 2k provides a single asset-focused data repository for work in a plant, that enables plant personnel to make sound business decisions with a high degree of confidence.

What else does TeamWork 2k do?

In addition to simply collecting all of the work-related data, TeamWork 2k includes the ability to do a number of critical functions that are sorely needed by plants today. These include:

Important Project or Turnaround related Work Management Functions	Typical Current Practice	TeamWork 2k Business Rule-based practice
Scope Development and Management	Each source of work (ex. Operations, Process, Reliability, Safety, Inspection, Engineering, etc.) maintains their own multiple spreadsheets in Excel, and send these on an ad hoc basis to the planner when they are 'ready' to do so. Many ad hoc revisions continue to show long after the 6-month deadline. This requires the planner to have to do last-minute incorporating of additional scope.	TeamWork 2k provides each external department with a web page that allows them to enter their planned scope in the same database that is used for planning. When they flag a scope as ready to Plan, it shows on the planners desktop. the planner always has a heads-up on potential new work. This visibility of potential work helps the entire plant staff to be aware of what is still to be done - nothing is hidden away out of view.
Cost Estimating of project or turnaround	MS Excel spreadsheets are currently the primary repository of cost estimates. The work done here is essentially lost to future reviewers of the work scope - as this information is not readily available.	TeamWork 2k provides simple and focused tools that help the estimator to quickly assemble accurate estimates of cost based on the scope of work that has already been identified. As the scope is in this system, there is less opportunity for miscommunication about the scope and the timing of the work being contemplated.
Planning of the Work scope	Currently this is done in MS Excel mostly. Planners are usually well trained in field processes but not so well familiar with computing software. However, MS Excel is well within their abilities. This, however, means that they enter data that has already been entered, and then later this data has to be entered elsewhere.	TeamWork 2k's planning tools allow for a smooth pass-through of relevant data from the scope and the estimate. The planner's planning workbench is easy enough for planners to use without having to learn a complex scheduling tool.
Scheduling of the Planned work	This process is typically handled with P6 or MS Project. This requires yet another entry of the scope of work into a schedule-type format, this time by expensive project schedulers.	TeamWork 2k incorporates all of the tools associated with business-rule-based scheduling. This means that you simply do not need to re-enter any data and can use the data 'as is' to create very effective and accurate schedules automatically. In addition, TeamWork 2k provides simple tools to transfer this schedule data into P6 or MS Project, so that you can take advantage of these programs effective reporting and display tools.
Baseline Management	In current practice, the scheduler remembers to create a baseline schedule when it is determined that one is needed. This is done by using the create Target process in P6 or MS Project.	TeamWork 2k automatically creates a baseline and a revised baseline following the addition of each approved change of scope into the plan. This automation is dated and provides a clear path of the events leading up to the change. This is useful when post project or post turnaround reviews are made to determine the reasons for budget or schedule variance.
Milestone and Period Management	Current practice requires that each milestone be entered into P6 or MS project. Activities and Tasks that lie in a turnaround or project period must be linked manually by the scheduler.	TeamWork 2k employs and automatic milestone generation and automatic linking system. This automates entry of as much as 70% of the ties that a scheduler makes - and it does so in a business-rule based, accurate manner. This is another example of the value-added that TeamWork 2k brings to the scheduling process.
Execution of the Planned and scheduled work	Foremen receive work lists that are created in P6, MS Project or Excel. Often, foremen further simplify these lists so that they can provide them to their crews along with drawings, data sheets and safety instructions as required by the plant's business process.	TeamWork 2k has a module that is focused on field supervision. This provides them a simple way to see their work days in advance as well as enables them to provide electronic feedback on the plan directly to the planners. Electronically attached notes and drawing provide them with a way to print electronic work packages, saving an enormous amount of coordination time.
Tracking of Time (LEMs), aka Incurred costs	In order to accurately track costs being billed by contractors, owners currently employ a variety of tools including dedicated time-tracking tools. These tools are usually stand-alone databases or spreadsheets and require considerable re-entry of data in order to be compared with other project progress data.	TeamWork 2k's eWorkforce tool is integrated closely to the plan and this ensures that time, materials and expenses are accurately charged to work items in the plan. This information is also obtained in a way that actually reduces the overall effort that is spent in collecting this information. Foremen are the source of the information and this helps to reduce the workload on both foremen and timekeepers.
Tracking of Progress	Progress measurement is currently, typically done in Excel spreadsheets. Yes, once again, a new set of spreadsheets is employed in helping to track progress in the field.	TeamWork 2k's integrated execution plan ensures that progress is reported on the planned work items. If a work item or work package is discovered in the field and is not in the plan, TeamWork 2k makes it easy to add. This ensures that people are not forced to 'hide' the costs associated with ad hoc field work, as is so often done today.
Reporting of Progress and Forecasts	The Excel file that is used for determining progress may also be used for reporting progress. Alternatively, addition spreadsheets are pressed into service to help the project controls people to deliver reports that management expects.	TeamWork 2k's reports assemble the data from the plan and schedule. Progress data from the field is converted into earned value. Incurred hours and costs from the field-generated LEMs are compared to earned value at the end of each shift or each day. This provides accurate measures of CPI and SPI for the entire project as well as for increasing levels of detail down to the work item.
Change management	Changes or Extra Work are a routine part of the project execution phase. Current practice involves the maintenance of a list of changes in an Excel spreadsheet. These changes, once approved are then manually added to the project or turnaround scope.	TeamWork 2k automatically tracks changes! It does this by flagging added work automatically. This work remains in the plan and awaits approval, electronically. If the execution people are proceeding without approval, they are not expected to 'hide' their progress or their incurred costs - they have a real work item to charge. TeamWork's eApprovals tool helps to route a change to people with the requisite spending authority. Apporvals result in an automatic assimilation of the planned changes into the revised baseline.
Cost Tracking	Cost tracking and forecasting involves the comparison of Budgeted costs to Incurred costs, Invoiced costs and committed costs. This process is currently almost universally done as a spreadsheet-based exercise by the cost control technician. It involves much re-entry of data and is thus prone to error as well as changing bsuiness rules.	TeamWork 2k's integrated cost tracking tool, allows electronic linking with your accounting system to obtain the invoiced and the committed costs. In addition, incurred costs are obtained from the internal eWorkforce LEM-tracking system. All of this means that your cost tracking information is always at your fingertips - without the need for any data re-entry! Forecast algorithms that are based on desired business-rules are employed to ensure that all of the reports produced by the system adhere to a consistent set of criteria. Management gets used to this and the project team benefits from this consistent approach as well.
History Tracking	Most of the Excel and P6 system do not track history. It is not easy to see when and how changes were made to a work package that caused its scope to grow from say, $100,000 to $200,000.	TeamWork 2k employs a behind the scenes history tracker that keeps tabs on all quantitative and qualitative changes to the scope of work that occurs following an approval of the plan. This means that there is an audit trail that can be followed that indicates who changed what scope and what the ensuing cost of the change was.
Approvals Management	Currently, approvals are a drastically manual and time-consuming process. It is not unusual to see people 'looking' for a supervisor to get the signatures required on certain documents. Imagine the time that both the supervisor and the subordinates can waste in this effort.	TeamWork 2k's eApproval system allows a document that needs approval to be routed electronically to the right person, and from there to the next person until all of the requisite electronic signatures have been obtained. The date that these were signed is automatically save as is the amount of time that it took for the signature to be obtained. Appropriate business rules are available for allowing designees to do the signing.
Document management	Each piece of work done in the field is accompanied, at a minimum, with a safety document. In addition there may be many other drawings, data sheets etc. Current practice involve the foreman or a designee going to file cabinets, retrieving the documents, copying them, then returning them to the cabinet. This process is time-consuming and does not help the field personnel to be efficient at all.	TeamWork 2k's eDocs system provide the means for the field to get electronic work packages - that have all of the necessary documentation ready to go when they send it to a printer. And this is just the start of the benefits associated with the object-focused document and notes management system that is embedded in TeamWork 2k.
Communication Management	Currently, e-mail inboxes and email folders bear witness to the chaos that email has wrought on business processes. Untold amounts of useful, project-specific information are buried in emails. This information would be far more useful if it was available in the project record. Today, people have to manually search their emails while the look for 'something' based on what they remember.	TeamWork's eNotify tool is an electronic means of ensuring that any commitments, comments, requests for information, etc. that are associated with any part of the project are recorded, date stamped and available for review at any time. In conjunction with the myBacklog tool, this allows each project or turnaround team member to be always aware of what is being expected of them and of what commitments they have made.
Issue management	When potential work is first identified, it is not always clear that a work package will be needed. Until that time a list should be maintained. Currently, this list will exist on paper or in Excel.	TeamWork 2k's eIssues tool provides a simple way to manage all types of issues until they move into resolution mode and even until complete resolution. Using this tool ensure that no issues are ignored. Business rule drive the business to address issues in a timely manner.

It should be obvious from this review that managing a project or a turnaround involves far more than can be done in Primavera's P6 or MS project alone. They can be a part of the solution, however, it's the management of the rest of the spreadsheet and databases that is the primary problem that TeamWork 2k resolves. The sheer number of people that are used to manage projects and turnarounds today can be reduced, and those that remain can have a significantly better work product by using TeamWork 2k.

How does TeamWork send data to P6 or MS project?

TeamWork's Export Manager utility tool allows us to create a map from each of the schedule-related elements of TeamWork's database to either P6's structure or MS Project. This task is something that a TeamWork Associate will typically perform for you. You can then simply export your data to MS Project or to P6. Once the data is in P6 or MS Project, you can use those tools to do whatever you wish. Any changes to data made in these tools will not be automatically sent back to TeamWork 2k.

Bear in mind that in TeamWork, a project or turnaround is broken down into work packages. Each work package has one or more work items. Each work item has Resources, Materials and Contracted costs. The following table is a simplified version of a map that shows how TeamWork data generally maps to P6 or MS Project data. A more detailed map is developed for real-life usage of the TeamWork to P6 or TeamWork to MS Project links.

TeamWork Data Element	TeamWork 2k Comments	P6 Comments	MSP Comments
Project	TeamWork 2k handles multiple projects in a work set - typically a work set holds all of the projects that a business unit manages.	P6 handles projects as part of its WBS.	MSP treats a project as a single entity and the data is saved as a single file.
Work Package	TeamWork 2k requires a project to be broken down into discrete work packages. These may be asset-based in the case of a turnaround or contractor or discipline-based in the case of capital projects.	P6 does not have a work package per se, however it does allow you to have unlimited levels of WBS. TeamWork 2k's work package is mapped as an activity code.	MSP does not support the concept of work package directly - however TeamWork 2k's Work package is mapped as a task code.
Work Item	A work item is the basic schedule-able element in TeamWork 2k.	P6's activity is derived from a TeamWork work item. The activity ID is typically assigned by TeamWork as the work package ID concatenated to the work item ID.	MS Project's task is derived from TeamWork's work item. The task ID is a sequential number that is assigned by MSP.
Milestone/Period/Window	TeamWork 2k auto-creates and manages a milestone for the start and finish of each period. A period is a timeframe (ex. pre-shutdown or commissioning) that requires all work items tagged with that period to be scheduled in that period. The period expands or contracts to fit the work in it. In addition, TeamWork 2k supports the concept of a window within each period. A window, like a period, has a start and finish milestone.	Milestones in P6 are manually created as needed and are manually tied to their successor and predecessor items. Period and window functionality does not exist.	Milestones in MSP are manually created as needed and are manually tied to their successor and predecessor items. Period and window functionality does not exist.
Human Resource	TeamWork 2k supports the entry of manpower (crafts, skills, trades, professional) resources.	TeamWork's manpower resources are transferred to P6 activities as created.	TeamWork's manpower resources are transferred to MSP tasks as created.
Equipment Resource	TeamWork 2k supports the entry of equipment resources.	TeamWork's equipment resources are transferred to P6 activities as created.	TeamWork's equipment resources are transferred to MSP tasks as created.
Consumable Materials	TeamWork 2k allows the entry of consumable materials, rates and markups associated with each work item.	TeamWork's materials are not sent to P6.	TeamWork's materials are not sent to MSP.
Contracted costs	TeamWork 2k allows the entry of contracted costs associated with each work item.	TeamWork's contracted costs are not sent to P6.	TeamWork's contracted costs are not sent to MSP.
Calendar	TeamWork 2k employs calendars on each work item to determine the shift schedule that the work is executed on	TeamWork creates a calendar in P6 to match that in TW.	TeamWork creates a calendar in MSP to match that in TW.
Resource rates	TeamWork 2k computes burdened rates for human resources from rate schedules that are part of the contract.	TeamWork does not currently send rates or any costs to P6.	TeamWork does not currently send rates or any costs to MSP.
Resource limits	TeamWork computes resource limits for resources based on available manpower in its employee table. You can also employ TeamWork's utilization rate to allow for unforeseen work scope.	TeamWork does not send resource limits to P6.	TeamWork does not send resource limits to MSP.

As you can see, there are many pieces of data that we currently support sending to p6 or MSP. You can have enough data in p6 or MSP to produce your colorful outputs. If additional information needs to be transmitted, this can be arranged quite easily.

How does TeamWork get data from P6 or MS project?

Bringing data in from P6 or MSP is a completely different problem that sending data to them. TeamWork 2k, is, by design a repository of data that meets the business rules of your business. There is a high level of consistency and accuracy in your data in TeamWork. This is due to data integrity constraints that are built into the database. However, this is not the case with projects in p6 or MSP. In these cases, each scheduler has his/her own pet approaches to handling the scheduling and coding problems in p6 and MSP. The result is that when you compare the work of two schedulers in P6, the results are quite different from each other. If a commitment can be made by the P6 schedulers and MSP schedulers that certain standards will be adhered to for coding the activities and tasks respectively, then The Import Manager module in TeamWork 2k may be employed to manage these imports on a routine basis. In any case, the assistance of a TeamWork Associate will be needed to get this process analyzed and started. Typically, it is less than a day's work to configure an import.

Conclusion

It should be obvious, from this discussion, that TeamWork 2k and scheduling applications such as P6 and MSP are designed to solve completely different problems. As such, they can co-exist synergistically in your organization and can routinely contribute to successful outcomes for your projects and turnarounds.

Please contact us for more information at:

cpmonteiro@teamworkgroup.com

De-constructing Project Progress Reporting

2009-02-02T18:42:00.001-08:00

Any trade names that are referenced are the property of their owners

Introduction

The most common question that a project's Project Manager hears is 'Where are we?' In order to accurately provide the answer to this seemingly simple question, many pieces of information need to be carefully collected and organized and tracked. In this post, we use common-sense reasoning to explain the project management processes that are necessary to track a project's progress. This de-construction helps us to question our assumptions about each step of the project controls process. This also helps to confirm that each of the steps that we take has a legitimate reason. This, in turn, helps to reinforce the lessons regarding the consequences of NOT taking a particular step in the project management process. This post is intended for readers who wish to learn, or brush up their knowledge, about the basics of controlling a project..

Project Management

The term 'Project Management' is commonly used to describe the processes associated with reporting of a project's progress. However, as anyone who has managed a project knows, managing a project involves far more that simply reporting on its progress. The Project Management Institute (PMI) has many explanations and definitions of the kinds of things that PM's do– so we do not go there in this article. Instead, we focus on what it takes to report on a project's progress. At a very basic level, it is the need for accurate progress reporting that helps us determine exactly what items we will measure and against what we will measure them.

In order to illustrate the terms and processes that we use, we refer to project management terms as they are used in the North American (US and Canadian) context. The way that tools on the market currently handle project management information is also discussed.

What is Progress?

When people request progress information, what they are looking for depends on their focus. The people who are waiting for that new bridge to be completed, so that their commutes will be shorter, are only interested in when it will be done. The sooner, the better! They are interested in the time aspect of the project's progress. Typical pipeline and facility projects are also very concerned about time. However, in addition to this, they are also concerned about the cost of the project. A projected cost-overrun is not a good thing, especially if it is not expected. Time and Costs are the twin core aspects of reporting progress. In fact, the most common reporting tool that management uses combines both of these aspects in a graphical plot of the expenditure of costs over time. This report is a graph of cumulative costs over the duration of the project. The shape of the cumulative curve is similar to a flattened letter 'S' and is therefore called an S-curve. So, clearly, to report progress, we need to be able to do the following:

Determine how much more time the project will take
How much money has already been spent on the project

How can we do these aspects accurately and effectively?

In order to determine the time remaining, we need to know what is remaining to be done. In a complex project, we may have thousands of inter-related items of work that need to be done. Some of these may be completed. Some may not have been started and some may have started and are not, as yet, complete. The schedule is the tool that handles thousands of inter-related work items in a logical network. We rely on the accurate data in the schedule and the scheduling computation to help us determine the remaining time in a project. We discuss how the schedule does its work and how we assemble the data that it needs later in this post.

Determining the cost expended appears to be a fairly simple task. Simply add up all of the bills that we have for costs. The materials we have bought have bills or receipts. The equipment that we have rented also have bills or receipts. The contractors that we hired have sent us invoices for each week or each month. These costs are called expended costs and are reflective of the invoices that we have received. However, they are do not show exactly what we have already asked the contractors to provide us – the committed costs. As you can see, the cost issue is getting a little cloudy now. We discuss this the relationship between expended, committed, incurred, earned, forecast and target costs, some more in the section on costs – following the section on scheduling.

Remember, we are de-constructing the progress management process in order to ensure that every step that we take has a legitimate reason.

How much time is left? The Reason for the Schedule

The schedule helps us to determine the remaining duration of the project. In order to do this, it needs to have certain information. The schedule must have the following:

Work items, each with a duration in hours, days, weeks, etc.;
Logic ties, that connect the work items;
Periods, that ensure that work is scheduled in the correct significant period of the project (if needed);
Windows, that ensure that the work is schedule within the correct window within each period (if needed);
Milestones, that define the start and finish of each period and each window;
Human Resources, are identified for each work item. Limits of manpower available force the schedule to be delayed;
Rental Equipment items are identified for each work item. Limits of availability of equipment items may force delays in the schedule;
Consumable Materials are identified for each work item if needed. Delivery schedules for materials are critical to ensuring that the work proceeds as scheduled. Inclusion of materials delivery schedule as well as vendor commitments help to complete the schedule and make it more believable;
Contracted Work, which the contractor provides on a lump sum (as opposed to time and materials) basis can potentially have an impact on, and should be included in, the schedule so that the project manager and project team is not blind-sided by delays due to this work not being ready on time;
Measurable Tasks associated with work items, are included if they provide a means for measuring progress based on the physical completion of work

The function of a scheduling tool is to use all of this information to help determine the completion date of the work. Logic between work items ensures that they are scheduled to be done in the correct sequence. The human and equipment resources, when limits are entered, may affect the scheduled dates of each of the work items – this is a good thing as we really do not want surprises due to not being aware of the problems associated with having fewer resources available. Likewise material delivery dates. If the material procurement cycle, along with the vendors' committed delivery dates are in the schedule, the schedule computations will result in a more realistic completion date for each work item and the project as a whole.

Now, it should be clear that the schedule needs plenty of useful information so that it can accurately complete its function. The project planners are the people that perform this function.

Planning the Work – Building an Effective Foundation for the Schedule

We have discussed the need for a schedule that contains all of the time-based work items in the project. In order to effectively create the schedule, Planners break down all of the work in the project into work packages. Work packages are bite-sized pieces of the project – this is a sort of project breakdown that also makes sense from the standpoint of the execution of the work – which is discussed later. A pipeline project is broken down into a work packages for each spread and for each facility. A turnaround project will have a work package for each asset. Once this is done, the planner(s) further breaks down each work package into discrete work items. In the case of a pipeline spread, this would be each of the major work items such as Clearing, Ditching, Welding, etc. Each work item is further broken down, if needed, into tasks. Each task may have a physical quantity as a target to complete. This quantity is the basis for tracking progress for the task. The progress for each task on each work item is weighted and then applied as progress on the work item. This is computed and set as a percent complete and a remaining duration for each work item with progress.. We discuss the issue of quantity and duration-based status in the discussion on the Execution phase of this article.

In any case, the detail of the plan should be the level to which the field will execute the plan and what they will use to report progress and charge their time. The field may decide to add to the level of detail provided by the planner.

As earned value is computed based on the planned hours and the estimated materials and contract dollars entered by the planner, you can see that this function is critical to determining the Target Cost as well as the Target (Baseline) Schedule. An inaccurate or incomplete plan is going to quickly manifest itself in a variety of ways. These include poor schedule performance (low Schedule Performance Index, SPI) as well as poor cost performance (low Cost Performance Index, CPI). Unless the plan is improved, its use as a means for earning value is limited and counter-productive.

A common cause for the degradation of the plan and the schedule is the way that field changes are managed. The Change Management section discusses the way that TeamWork 2k handles this issue.

As you have seen, it is important to have a good, detailed plan. However, at the front-end of a project, while the pieces of information regarding the content of the project are coming together, how is it possible to have a good plan? This leads to the issue of scope definition and management.

Managing the Project's Scope – Ensuring a Great Plan

As the project's evolves, drawings are issued for construction (IFC). These drawings help to provide the scope of work in capital projects. Inn turnaround projects, the lists of assets, that operations provides, provides the basis of the scope of work. The project manager and the project staff keep track of the scope items by creating work packages for each. These work packages are later used by the planner to provide the detail for scheduling.

A project's scope is 'frozen' at a certain date prior to the beginning of the construction phase. Following this point, additional scope changes are automatically tracked as changed scope. This allows project management to track changes and report on the effect of these changes to the scope of the project. In addition to knowing which items constitute changed scope, it is necessary to get these changes approved on a regular basis. A change management system includes the ability to tag one or more changes with a change number or ID. Each change makes a trip from the scope definition, to the planner, for planning and estimating, to the PM for approval. All changes that have a cost impact must be approved by a person in the project (or company) with the appropriate signing authority for the dollar amount f the change. In order for the PM to have an accurate idea of the impact of the change on the project, the change authorization request must include along with the cost impact, an indication of the impact on the overall schedule of the project.

It is important that the current scope of the project is always accurately stated in the plan and the schedule. This requires every member of the project team, especially the front-line supervisors and foremen to ensure that every work item that they work on is accurately included in the plan.

This leads us to discuss the Execution phase of the work, as this is where the whole project finally comes together: the engineering, scope development, planning, scheduling, targeting, cost tracking, etc.

Executing the Plan – where the rubber meets the road

The field is the 'work face'. It is where work is done according to the plan and the schedule. The people in the field are critical players in communicating all aspects of the work being done. They can be the source of disconcerting news too. Such as: the plan is not a good one. Or: the schedule is unworkable. Or: materials are not available. The field is where people have to get the job done (safely!), no matter what. So, it is critical that field people, including their potentially 'bad' feedback about the plan, are an integral part of the progress tracking process. The foreman's crew is working on the job every day.

Who else could possibly provide insights into the progress of the work and the potential problems that are ahead? This information leads directly to the accurate determination of earned value.
The foreman is the logical person to report on any additional scope items as well as their magnitude. This affects scope change tracking, thus ensuring that an accurate baseline is maintained.
The foreman is also the logical person to accurately report on what his/her crew did that day. This information is also known as Incurred value (hours and costs).

Clearly, the most accurate sources of information during the execution phase are the field supervision people. They are the closest to the work. As they report all of their information on a daily (or shift) basis, it is important to track the progress of the project at the same rate. If you make it easy for them to enter their data into a single system (your system for progress tracking) then you have the best information as early as possible.

Another benefit of including your field supervision in the project at this level is that they plan their future work based on what the plan and the schedule have – which in turn makes them invested in ensuring that the plan is a sound one.

Now, that we have gone through the processes from progressing needs to scheduling, to planing, to scope management, through to execution, we are now ready to discuss the report that we will use to report this progress – Progress Reporting.

Reporting the Progress – what's the Good news?

We'll keep it simple . . . the big two items are time and money. We mentioned the S-Curve before. This curve plots cumulative hours or dollars on the y-axis against time in weeks or months on the x-axis.

The target s-curve is what we are shooting for. It is also known as the baseline. As we have already discussed, the planned scope changes. Therefore, the baseline changes. So we need to maintain a fresh baseline that reports to management the current effects of the latest changes. In order to see the transition over time, from the original baseline to the current baseline, it will be necessary to maintain a history of each baseline. Baseline management is discussed later.

In addition to the baseline s-curve, which stretch from the beginning of the project (0% Progress) to the end of the project (100% progress), two additional curves are normally plotted: Earned and Incurred. Earned human hours or earned costs (we'll refer to these as earned value) are the hours or costs that were estimated, and that are now in the baseline, for the current amount of progress. If the earned value exceeds the baseline value from the baseline curve, the project is ahead of schedule. The Incurred value curve is a plot of the labor, equipment, materials and other costs that have been incurred to-date. This is the cost incurred in obtaining the current earned value. If the earned value exceeds the incurred value your project is under budget, as you are making more progress for less cost.

It should be obvious here that an accurate system needs to exist for both:

the determination of progress and how it gets converted into earned value, as well as
the collection on incurred costs in a timely and accurate manner

These issues are tackled in the next two sections.

Earned Value Determination

in order to accurately obtain earned value, we depend on the work of the planner(s) that provided the initial estimates for human hours, equipment, materials and contracted costs associated with the work. Also, the foreman (foremen) in charge of executing the work need to provide an accurate accounting of the work being done (including new work that was previously not identified), and the remaining quantity of either duration hours or a logical physical unit (such as lineal feet of a pipeline).

The ratio of the remaining quantity to the original quantity provides a measure of the percent complete of the work item:

Percent Complete = 100 x (1-Remaining Quantity/Original Quantity)

The percent complete multiplied by the work item's value (hours and/or cost) provides the earned value of the work item.

In order to ensure that a trend of the earned value over time is obtained, it is necessary to record the daily value for quantity remaining for each task on each work item. This is routinely done by the field staff.

Collecting Incurred Value

The cost that your contractor bills you, for today's work, is the incurred value of today's work for that contractor. You have incurred that cost. It is not yet on an invoice or even in the mail. It should be in your system within 12 hours of being incurred. If the foreman enters his/her crew's time into your system directly and if the timekeeper validates that time and adds other costs at the end of the shift, this target is easily met. This means that you can compare your earned vs. incurred (also known as earned vs. burned) each day. A trend of this ratio is your productivity curve and helps the PM to decide whether the project needs corrective action. In order to provide a way to truly compare earned value with incurred value, these costs must be collected at the same level that the planner planned the plan. That's right. The hard work that the planner does continues to provide payback to the project deep in the execution phase. What if a work item that is needed by the field is not available in the plan and the schedule? The timekeeping system must allow the field people to add the missing work item 'on the fly'. They must feel that their timekeeping is accurate and that they have a stake in accurate data collection. In fact, the reports that are produced will validate their work automatically – further saving a huge amount of field effort in the area of report preparation of weekly and monthly reports.

OK, so, now we have our graphs, how about answering the first 2 questions?

When will you be done?
What's it going to cost me?

This leads us to forecasting.

Forecasting Cost and Schedule – where are we?

We mentioned two indexes previously, the CPI and SPI: These are computed as follows

Cost Performance Index, CPI = Earned Value / Incurred Value
Schedule Performance Index, SPI = Earned Value / Baseline Value

These two indexes can be used to compute a forecast cost at completion, based on the CPI and a forecast date of completion, based on the SPI.

As with any computed value, the numbers obtained are heavily dependent on all of the numbers that lead to these – careful attention to each of the detailed data elements leads to a higher confidence factor in the computed forecast costs and dates. That has been the objective of this document – to focus on the elements that deliver the desired results. Formula for forecasting cost and dates are:

Forecast Cost at Completion = Incurred Cost + (Remaining Baseline Cost / CPI)

Forecast Completion Date = Data Date + (Baseline Duration Remaining / SPI)

Note that your company's business rules for these computations may be different and the system that you use should be able to reflect your business rules.

Before we get too comfortable with our work we need to tie up some loose ends. Remember the Expended costs and the Committed Costs? Where do they now fit in?

How much have we spent? How much is left? The reason for the Budget

We know that we can easily track the amount that we have spent. This number is the sum of the credit card receipts, the invoices received, the checks written. This is called the Expended Cost. Assuming that the expended costs are the only extent of costs on the project is not facing reality. Project Controls is about peering ahead to determine what costs the project can expect. Each of the contracts, with contractors and vendors, represents a commitment that your project has to spend a certain amount of money. As this commitment does not, yet, show in the expended costs, it is easy to assume that you are not, yet, 'on the hook' for the contracted costs. This would be a mistake. Committed cost is a critical element of the cost story for the project. If committed cost exceeds expended costs, you need to turn your focus towards committed costs as the potential budget-breaker costs in the project. Once the project has started, it starts incurring costs. Incurred cost is the term that we use to define the costs that the project has incurred. An example helps to explain the difference between incurred costs and expended costs. Your contractor had 1000 people on your job site today. You just incurred a cost (of 1000 people x10 hours x $50 =) $500,000, that is not on any invoice or bill - yet! So, incurred cost is an approach to tracking your costs at the source and at the time of their being incurred. This, in turn, ensures that there will be no surprises – you should know your incurred costs on a daily basis. In order to know if any of these costs, expended, committed or Incurred exceeds the amount that you planned to spend, also known as the Budgeted Cost, you should be paying close attention to the project's progress. In order to create a realistic budget, you must first estimate the costs associated with the project. The estimating process is discussed in the Estimating the work.

Estimating the Costs – getting ready to create a Budget

Long before the planner gets involved, when the engineering drawings are at 30% complete, the estimating process provides a means for obtain a project budget. This estimating process is typically done for capital projects. It involves a materials take-off from the drawings. The materials quantities are multiplied with man-hour rates for installation. The man hours that are obtained in this way are then multiplied by current labor rates to obtain labor costs. These labor costs are added to estimated materials, equipment and sub-contracted costs to obtain the estimated cost for the project. Contingency costs due to unknowns, fees and other costs are included with the estimate to help ensure that a reasonable cost is obtained.

As the project's schedule is nowhere near being formulated, the budgeted amount is 'time-lined' manually using a cash-flow tool.

Appropriate company and/or project managers will approve the budget that is obtained in this manner.

Once the appropriate approvals are obtained, the project continues to progress from the engineering through the procurement towards the construction phase. This project cycle is commonly referred to as the EPC cycle. Managing the project means managing each of these cycles separately and together in the project or work management tool.

Project Baseline – What are we comparing our progress to?

A human hour project baseline is available for the planned and scheduled expenditure of human hours over the life of the project. In addition, a cost baseline is available for the planned and scheduled expenditure of costs over the duration of the project. As work scope is added to or removed from the plan, it may be necessary to re-baseline the project. In this situation, the TeamWork 2k's Re-baseline process provides the means to create the new baseline based on a 'pure' schedule – one with no progress. Some project managers prefer to see multiple baselines on their charts. TeamWork 2k maintains a history of each baseline in its snapshot area. The maximum number of human hours in the baseline is the Target Human Hours. The maximum cost that the baseline reaches is the Target Cost.

So, now we have baselines and targets and we are ready to see how we measure up against these.

Summary of Progress Measurement and Management

Bottom line . . . the process is certainly not hard. What is hard is trying to do all of the work in ONE system. The benefits of doing so are many, including less data manipulation and handling leading to less redundant data handling, which leads to more accuracy.

You will have now done away with the need for summarizing their progress, changes and incurred costs on a weekly or monthly basis. You have now evolved to a project management approach that is integral to the project – rather than one that is separate from it, as are most systems are today. Excel spreadsheets cost data, Primavera schedules with scheduled activities, Access databases with time data, Powerpoint presentations with management reports. This is the norm for project reporting today. And this is a very expensive way to do business. That would be OK - except that it is also extremely disconnected and thus prone to inaccuracies that are due to the redundant handling of data.

Another huge benefit is that the project team has a better quality of work – they do not need to spend countless hours manipulating spreadsheets, databases, presentations, schedules, etc. Management has 24x7 access to project data and is not dependent on field teams working overnight several days in a row to produce that monthly report. And the reports have no surprises – that is the nature of a well-used and widely-used system.

Talk to us at The TeamWork Group, Inc. We have the people, the tools and the know-how that can help your company take the management of projects to the next level.

Managing a Pipeline Project

2009-01-27T20:55:00.001-08:00

Product names mentioned in this post are the property of their owners.

What is different about a pipeline project?

In pipeline construction, as in other logistics-based projects like railroad building, laying cables, building roads, etc., the primary measure of physical progress is the distance (i.e. feet or meters) completed per day. This requirement helps to differentiate reporting and work processes from those associated with such location-specific projects as bridges, dams, tunnels, process plants, software development, movie making, etc.

I have chosen to focus on pipeline projects as my experience with distance-based projects is in this area. In the 1970s, the rush was on to develop the big new European oil resource under the North Sea. The Norwegians, Brits, Germans, Danes and the Dutch each administer huge chunks of this body of water. Much oil and gas was discovered under water depths ranging from 200 ft to 500 ft. Cutting-edge technology was developed to aid in the design and construction of offshore platforms and pipelines that allowed these oil and gas resources to be retrieved. As a newly-minted engineering graduate in the mid 70s, I was in the right place at the right time to play a small role in designing and building the infrastructure that would bring these resources ashore.

Although my time in this oil patch was brief, there were huge opportunities for learning. I worked on the design and fabrication of offshore platforms as well as the design and construction of pipelines and pipeline-laying equipment.
I learned so much more about the essence of engineering - ingenious, problem-solving, can-do approach - from the people that I had the opportunity to learn from during these years in, and around, the North Sea. Observe the problem. Design a solution. Build it. Commission it. As the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s also coincided with the meteoric evolution of computing technology, it became a passion to properly manage the data associated with projects in the most efficient way possible. My engineering skills have been a core aspect of each of the data design projects that I have undertaken over the years while using a variety of increasingly newer technologies. Currently, client/server databases and web-based wireless access form the leading-edge of technology. This technology, in the hands of front-line people (foremen and superintendents), ensures the most effective use of all of the project data while ensuring the least redundancy.

During the period from the 1970s to the present, I have also seen the evolution of project management technology. Today, the confluence of data management, wireless technology, internet and demands for transparency by managers and investors has combined to impose an unprecedentedly high set of expectations on project managers. A pipeline project can cost a billion dollars. Incurring costs at the rate of multiple millions a day is routine in such projects. Imagine yourself as a Project Manager, Director, or VP in charge of a pipeline project. You have to be confident that for the $2,000,000 that was incurred yesterday by the construction team, your project earned at least $2,000,000 of value. The trended CPI (cost performance index) should be steadily at 1 or above. This has all the signs of a stressful job.

This article discusses basic approaches to ensuring that your pipeline construction project proceeds on time, within budget, safely, in an environmentally sound manner and with high quality.

Project Management Organization

The primary objective of the project management system is to measure the progress and other measurement indexes such as earned value, incurred, budget, target, etc. These are compared to a baseline of expectations. If this job is done well, the project management team has the resources needed to make sound decisions that will ensure that the project progresses to a safe, desirable and stress-free conclusion. A discussion on methods for establishing and maintaining the baseline is included along with a discussion of the functional roles and responsibilities of the key members of the project management and execution team.

Plan the Work, then, Work the Plan

Planning the Work involves developing the scope of the work, human, equipment and other resources, materials, costs and time required to do the work. These processes are usually assigned to people that are functional experts such as Project Managers, Estimators, Planners and Schedulers.

Working the Plan involves a different focus and the functional experts that do this include Project Manager, Foreman, Superintendent, Contract Administrator, Timekeeper, Cost Analyst, Field Engineer, etc.

We use each of these functional experts to help us navigate the project management processes involved with managing a pipeline project. We discuss each of the duties involved in each of these functions along with the data collected and the reports produced for management review as well as to ensure project success. We then discuss some software tools that project team members and others use to collaborate electronically as well as manage data more efficiently.

Project Manager

The buck stops with the project manager (PM). If things go badly, the PM is the scapegoat. The PM is to the project what the coach is to the football team. He calls the shots and directs the key people in the team. She identifies any shortcomings early and, in a timely manner, implements solutions to overcome these. The PM needs a tool that helps in the creation of a complete scope of the project. No changes to the scope of the project are allowed to 'sneak' into the project without the knowledge of the PM. However, at the same time, people often work on out-of-scope work. The data management system is configured to allow the addition of out-of-scope work automatically and easily. This new scope is designated, automatically, as unapproved until the PM approves it. Out-of-scope work is either unforeseen or unexpected work. It may occur because of inexperience or because an unexpected hurricane blew in during the project. Contingency may be used to defray these unexpected costs. The PM also needs to have the base plan along with changes always available. This plan indicates where the project is expected to be today. Estimator(s), planner(s) and scheduler(s) are charged with ensuring the continuous existence of an accurate baseline while the project is being planned as well as after execution has started.

TeamWork 2k's myProjects tool provides the PM with the tools needed to see the scope, cost and schedule of the project at any time. In addition, other key performance indicators (KPI's) such as safety performance are available to the PM. TeamWork 2k's robust reporting tools provide the PM with the horsepower needed to report on the state of the project to corporate management. myProjects provides access to each of the project reports at both a detailed work item level as well as rolled up to various levels of the project WBS.. These include cost, human-hour, and other progress reports - in tabular and graphical formats.

Estimator

The Estimator uses a project's drawings to build a time, cost and materials estimate of labor and in-place materials required for the project. Third-party estimating databases such as Richardson's and Mean's provide the estimator with associated labor rates for installation of the materials. Tools for the inclusion of escalation, contingency, burdened rates, etc. are available to the estimator. The line items from the estimate may later be linked with the planner's plan line items. This provides an integrated means for spreading the estimate over time in order to provide a cash flow. Alternatively, a manual cash-flow tool is available that allows the estimator to easily spread costs for estimated line items over the duration of the project. This results in what is commonly called a cash flow.

The most commonly available tool in use today for estimating is an Excel spreadsheet. The flexibility of Excel makes it a logical tool for use in an environment where estimating is a new concept. However, repeated use of Excel becomes a tedious process as more estimators are expected to use the same format. Newer ideas are hard to incorporate into the estimate spreadsheet. In addition, it is difficult to maintain an accurate, definitive and current spreadsheet, when so many people are on the distribution list.

TeamWork 2k's eStimate application is an ideal solution for estimators. Data from drawings are entered into the central TeamWork 2k database. This data is available for re-use and review by all team members who have appropriate rights. For example, the Buyer does not have to re-enter all of the estimate line items into another Excel spreadsheet or into another application, in order to actually purchase the materials. He/she simply uses the exact data from the estimate!

The end result of the estimating process is that a cost estimate for the project and an expenditure cash flow is available as a basis for cost tracking as well as the scheduling processes.

Planner

While, the estimator's job is to figure the cost based on the in-place materials in engineering drawings, the Planner, on the other hand, arrives at cost based on building a planned sequence of work items in a work package. The planner's plan includes the cost of labor crafts and crews as well as the cost of rental equipment, if required, consumable materials and sub-contracted costs. The planner links the work items using ties (precedence relationships) into a coherent flow of work. The person that prepared your Thanksgiving dinner deserves credit as a natural planner! Imagine if he/she had started cutting and cooking the yams on Thanksgiving morning, rather than placing the thawed, stuffed turkey in the oven. Your yams would be cold by the time the turkey was done. Planners save their company - and their PM - untold amounts of heartburn, and dollars, simply by developing a sound, workable, field-walked-down plan. They have spent the time in the field thinking through and 'building' each step of work involved in the completion of the planned work package. Plans are created for each work package. A work package is a basic component of the scope of the project - a part of its WBS (work breakdown structure).

Planners today use MS Excel, MS Project, or Primavera
as a primary planning tool. The problems associated with Excel have been discussed previously. MS Project and Primavera are both project scheduling tools that standalone - isolated from all of the other project tools - such as the scope development and estimating, cost management tools. Their ability to easily export data simply helps to cause more fragmentation of the project's data. This leads to a greater need for more people to spend time managing this increasing spread of data in spreadsheets.

TeamWork's myPlans planning tool leverages the project scope and estimated data that has already been entered to ensure that the planner stays focused on planning the identified work - rather than spending time re-entering the work packages that have already been estimated. myPlans also allows the plans to be easily updated with scope changes, thus automatically maintaining conformance with the company's business rules. A planner can stay focused on building the plan on a hand-held wireless device if needed.

Scheduler

Scheduling is the process whereby dates are calculated for each work item in the plan. The scheduling engine uses the information provided to compute these dates. Information is either schedule-based or resource-based. Schedule-based information includes duration of work items as well as the logic that connects a work item to others. Additional nuances such as periods and milestones help the scheduling engine to ensure that work is scheduled in the appropriate window of time. Resource-based information comes from the contractors that supply the manpower and equipment for accomplishing the work. The numbers of available skilled personnel are modeled into the scheduling engine as resource limits. By using these resource limits and the periods over which are available, the scheduling engine ensures that reasonable dates are computed for each work item. When a reasonable schedule has been derived in this manner, the PM should snapshot the scheduled plan into a Target or a Baseline. This process (snapshot to target to baseline) may need to be repeated as new scope is added.

Another reason for re-targeting the project is when the progress is so out of whack compared to the original target, the PM decides to create a recovery schedule as a new, revised target.

TeamWork 2k's eSchedule tool operates, behind the scenes, as an automated, business rule-driven scheduling engine. This means that, once your business rules have been modeled into the system, it continues to produce consistent schedules at a pre-defined frequency. This, in turn removes the need for the huge overhead in technical scheduling personnel that many projects are currently burdened with. eSchedule also supports the transfer of schedule data into Primavera and MS Project. These applications can now be used for plotting of Gantt charts, Logic Diagrams, histograms, etc. TeamWork 2k also provides its own version of these types of diagrams as reports and on-screen displays.

The deliverable of a scheduling process is a workable schedule. This schedule forms the basis for the execution of work in the field. It is therefore critical that the schedule is workable and reasonable from the standpoint of execution using available resources. eSchedule uses the company's business rules to routinely produce workable field schedules. More on this is discussed in the section on Execution (Field Engineer, Superintendent, Foreman).

Now we move into the executing the plan section of this discussion.

Buyer

The Project Buyer or Purchase Agent has to buy materials and services at an optimal cost. The work done by this person and his/her team ensures that costs are kept to a minimum while quality and timely deliverables are maintained. The buyer requires a means to aggregate all of the materials requests from each of the projects that are currently being contemplated. The project schedule clearly affects the timing of the placement of the purchase order as well as the delivery of the purchased items. These schedule constraints should always be available to the buyer. Likewise, if a delivery of a critical material is going to be late, the schedule should be automatically 'made aware' of this.

Approved planned packages are automatically the source of the information in bid packages. The Buyer electronically sends these bid packages to potential bidders. The bidders, in turn, respond to the bid request electronically. The buyer and the project team review bids and select the winning bids, notify the winning bidder, query the bidders, all electronically and in a manner that ensures that an electronic record is kept of all communications and decisions.

TeamWork's eBuyer tool is designed to integrate with the estimate, plan and schedule in order to streamline the flow of data to and from the purchasing department. Materials Expeditors use the system to keep track of deliverables and where they are delivered.

Field Engineer, Superintendent, Foreman

The field is where the 'rubber meets the road'. All of the previous work in the project, the estimating, the planning, the scheduling and the buying, all see their benefit in the execution phase of the project - which is in the field. Today, however, it is still common practice for the field to 'create the wheel from scratch'. They create tracking spreadsheets and charts and enter data into scheduling application and presentation applications. This is a huge waste of effort and serves as a potential disconnect in the management of the scope of work. Execution people need to be able to work the planned schedule and to be able to modify it to suit changing conditions in the field - as they occur. They certainly need to keep track of the progress
of each work item. This progress is used by the scheduling engine to re-schedule each shift or each day in order to produce fresh workable schedules. Today, foremen routinely perform the time-consuming process of preparing timesheets for their crews at the end of each shift. This is now done electronically with wireless hand-held computers. This approach ensures that the entire field operation is an integral component of the project.

TeamWork 2k's eXecution application is a tool that is designed for daily use by foremen and field personnel. It is integrated into the same system that provides management level reports and thus is an extremely fast-track and highly visible approach to project management. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities for bad data, or no data, to enter the system. However, the highly visible and non-redundant nature of the project data makes these holes easy to find, and then resolve. This results in a well run project, with few surprises.

Contract Administrator

Each of the contractors that support a project has negotiated a set of rates and other terms with the owner. It is useful for the project team to be aware of the contractual rates and other terms. This enables them to quickly react to any potential issues associated with real or perceived non-conformance to contractual obligations. Simply managing each of the rates for each of the labor crafts, skills and trades, each of the equipment rentals as well as any consumables that are supplied by the contractor is a huge task that is often done in a spreadsheet. Another complexity is that rates can change over the duration of the project.

TeamWork 2k's eContracts application is designed to provide a means to manage each contract's rates as well as other terms. The actual contract can be printed and sent electronically from eContracts. This system also directly integrates with eWorkforce, the system for tracking a project's incurred costs.

Timekeeper

The Timekeeper is a ubiquitous presence on construction sites. He/she/they spend a lot of time entering timesheet data into Excel spreadsheets or Access databases. This is a time-consuming process. Sadly, it is also riddled with places for errors to creep in. These errors render the data collected virtually useless - other than as a project-level check on incurred human hours, equipment hours and consumables. A major reason for the degraded value of timekeeping data is the sheer number of WBS, work order, account, GL or other codes that timekeepers and foremen have to select from. A simple error at this point renders the data useless for drilling down to the work item level.

TeamWork 2k's eWorkforce application was designed to link with the project schedule to ensure that all time is charged to a work item in the scheduled plan. Should an appropriate work item not exist, eWorkforce permits the timekeeper or foreman to create a work item (or even a work package) on the fly. This process is a foolproof means for collecting time against a specific work item. Any queries or mischarges are easily addressed and fixed. eWorkforce also permits a tracking of each of the decisions made with respect to reversal of time charges. This makes auditing this data quite easy. The eXecution application provides a means for the foremen to directly enter their data into eWorkforce - thus allowing timekeepers to serve the more valuable function of ensuring accurate and complete data is available for each employee. Better quality data is now available.

Accounts Receivable

Knowing what you have been invoiced for is a critical aspect of managing a project. Typically, large companies have in-house enterprise system such as Oracle or SAP that serve as a repository for this information. In cases such as this it would be useful to have a data transfer from these systems directly into the cost analysts system. Often, the analyst simply re-types the information into his/her spreadsheet

TeamWork 2k provides an integration tool that allows it to easily query an external source of data, then import and process that data. In addition, if needed TeamWork's eInvoice system can be used as a project-level tracking tool for review of invoiced items.

Cost Analyst

As the project progresses, money is being spent. It is the cost analyst's job to track this expenditure and to predict (forecast) where the costs are headed. To do this he/she tracks some key indexes. These include Incurred costs, committed costs and expended costs. The usual tool available to cost analysts for this tracking is a spreadsheet. Sadly, this means the entry of project data in the cost analyst's spreadsheet.

TeamWork 2k's myCosts application is designed to help the cost analyst by providing a solution that is integrated with the rest of the project. Incurred costs flow in from the eWorkforce application. Committed costs flow in from the eBuyer application or from the corporate purchasing tool, such as Oracle or SAP. Likewise expended costs flow in from the corporate accounts receivable system. myCosts provides a single point access for the analyst to review the latest costs on a daily basis and to provide a means for the analyst to forecast costs, use contingency as well as make timely pre-payments to contractors for work done.

Tools for collaboration and improved data management

As you have seen, TeamWork 2k has tools to support the functions of each of the major players in a project team. In order to ensure the necessary level of collaboration between project team members, TeamWork 2k has a few additional tools that are intrinsic to most of the applications.

eIssues - allows users to identify issues of any kind and to track these issues to their successful resolution in a timely manner.

eRef - is an electronic documentation system that provides help on each of the applications and tools within the TeamWork suite of applications.

eDocs - is a tool for attaching documents to 'objects' such as projects, contracts, Timesheets, work packages, assets, etc. This is a very useful tool as it removes the need for the user to chase down support documentation associated with the project or any of its components.

eNotes - is a note-keeping tool that allows the attachment of notes to 'objects' such as projects, contracts, Timesheets, work packages, assets, etc. This is a very useful tool that provides a means of annotating objects so other users may be notified.

eApprovals - is a tool that allows you to send your project or change or bid award, or other such items to appropriate people in the project for their electronic approval. This tool keeps track of dates of approvals. It saves a lot of wasted time in managing of paperwork.

eNotify - this is TeamWork 2k's internal email manager. It sends emails to people inside and outside your company and records this notification. It is a great tool for tracking who 'has the ball' and how long they have had it.

myBacklog - is a tool for people to see exactly which items still await their attention. Again, this is a great tool for simplifying the process of knowing what should be worked on next.

Reports - TeamWork 2k has a huge library of reports that support each of the applications. Many of these reports have been configured in Crystal reports, some are in Excel and others in HTML. Application-specific reports appear on report menus in appropriate locations.

Blue Hand - this is TeamWork 2k tool that provides context-specific actions for the user. If you see a Blue hand on a screen, clicking it reveals a list of the actions that are appropriate at that particular point of the application.

Conclusion

Managing a pipeline project, and indeed, any project, involves juggling a lot of issues. TeamWork 2k provides a consistent framework for you to build your project so that it runs from start to finish in a consistent, predictable, stress-free and safe way. Each person in your team can tap into the TeamWork 2k project database and provide data or analyze data as required. It should be clear that the system has been designed from the ground up to be malleable to be able to meet the different business objectives of different organizations as well as of different project types in different industries. TeamWork 2k has been designed to be so tailorable that you could make it speak a language other than English - without any additional programming.

The sooner you start the process of getting your projects organized, the sooner you will achieve the repeatable project success that is the goal of all project managers and the companies that own projects.

We at the TeamWork Group, Inc. are glad to make ourselves available, in person or over the Web, to help you decide your options and to help you manage your projects. Our TeamWork associates can be on-site with you and your team or available on the web. In either case we help your team by helping them build skills and processes that ensure 100% project success.

Please contact us at: cpmonteiro@teamworkgroup.com

Managing a Plant Maintenance Turnaround

2009-01-05T20:21:00.001-08:00

Product names mentioned in this post are the property of their owners.

What is a plant maintenance turnaround?

In order to ensure that a process plant continues to run at peak efficiency, it is prudent to do a sort of "spring cleaning" of huge sections of the plant. This cleaning and repair process is called a turnaround (stop the plant, clean and repair, then start the plant). In certain industries and areas, a turnaround may also be called a shutdown, an outage, an overhaul, a slowdown. In all cases, an operating plant or plants are carefully and safely shutdown. Maintenance workers then descend on the plant and work around the clock for days or weeks to get the plant ready to run again. Plant downtime is money lost and the owner is willing to pull out all the stops to ensure that the plant is up and running (and earning money) as soon as possible.

Turnaround Management Organization

In order to manage all of the work that is involved in a turnaround, the maintenance manager and plant manager typically assign the position of turnaround manager to a seasoned engineer or project manager. The newly-assigned turnaround manager has a number of challenges to confront. These include:

The immediate need for a strong team of support staff to help manage the turnaround
Coordinating the efforts of 100 or more contractor companies and their personnel
Assimilating and managing the scope of work to be done during the turnaround
Planning the work in the upcoming turnaround
Scheduling the turnaround work
Coordinating with operations and process personnel regarding availability of operating assets, as well as approval tracking
Managing the safe execution of the work
Accurate tracking of costs
Timely and accurate payment to contractors
Logistical planning and support of the turnaround effort
Accurate recording of work done in the historical record of the plant's assets

Each of these challenges, and their relevance to the turnaround management process, is discussed in turn. We use the features of the TeamWork 2k work management system to highlight how an integrated tool that supports all of these efforts is the turnaround manager's best option to ensure that a successful outcome is guaranteed.

Too many turnarounds today still result in the turnaround manager having an abrupt and involuntary career change. This occurs for a variety of reasons, including poor decisions with respect to the timely handling of turnaround-related information. It is ironic that, in the information age, we are using tools such as Excel and Word to bury ourselves in redundant data that is the result of poor data management choices.

Turnaround Team

Many plants troll for turnaround personnel from the ranks of their in-house staff or from their contractor companies. It is important to ensure that the people chosen are knowledgeable in the management of maintenance work. Too often I have heard the call go out for "Primavera planners." A person that understands how to use a software tool is not the equivalent of a person who knows how to plan the disassembly, cleaning, repair and re-assembly of a tower, an exchanger bundle or a heater. In fact, the team that makes this wrong choice has a huge problem from the very start of the turnaround. This is a fatal flaw in the organization.

The turnaround data management tool should NEVER determine who is on your team. Ensure that you have good people who understand the scope and nature of the work. These people will take to the appropriate turnaround tool as easily as a duck to water––regardless of their experience with computers.

TeamWork 2k's Web-based turnaround work management tool is available 24x7 on the Web. Any application on the Web is, by definition, an easy application to master. It will not require experts in scheduling, database, word processing or spreadsheet software to be used effectively and accurately.

Contractor Management

You may have five to ten major contractor companies, each supplying 100 to 1000 people for the turnaround effort. Each of these may have a few sub-contractors. In addition, you may have service contracts for smaller numbers of specialty people such as painters, NDE technicians, compressor mechanics, etc. You have to have a plan for distributing the work to the available workforce. You have to decide whether you will have time and materials (T&M) or lump sum (LS) contracts. Do you plan to have contractors with union people work alongside those with non-union people? If you do, you need to have an agreement with the unions that outlines the rules of engagement. You certainly do not want to be surprised by labor action at the beginning of your turnaround.

You will need to prepare a bid package for each chunk of work. Along with the scope of work, each contract needs to include your expectations for the contractor's timekeeping and progress reporting. You will need to have a team to prepare these packages for issuance to the contractors. Another team needs to review the bids that are received.

Your team then needs to work closely with the winning contractors to ensure that the plans are workable within target timeframes. A detailed review and walk-through of the site by your planners and contractor planners is a mandatory requirement that pays dividends in ensuring that there are no surprises once the work starts.

TeamWork 2k is a great tool for having both your staff and the contractors work from the same playbook––yours. Bids can be prepared based on the estimates and plans already completed in TeamWork 2k. Bid comparisons and awards can be made from TeamWork 2k. You can coordinate meeting agendas and minutes, as well as training for your in-house and contractor personnel. TeamWork 2k also provides a means for attaching contract bids and other documents to the turnaround project. This provides everyone in your team with ready access to all relevant contract documents.

This saves immensely in meeting time, and prevents redundant communications such as, "What does the contract say about supplying safety PPE?" or "Where is the contract?" These types of questions are following by a rummage through a filing cabinet or a search for the MS Word document that is saved on a clerk's hard disk. More wasted time.

Scope Management

Just what exactly is the scope of the turnaround? Currently, each department in the plant maintains its own "wish list" of items for the next turnaround. These lists are maintained laboriously in Excel spreadsheets or standalone Access databases. They are pulled out and provided to plant managers about six months prior to a turnaround. Turnaround scope items should be collected and maintained in the same place that all maintenance work scope is maintained––the asset work manager. When this is done, the opportunity for completing turnaround scope is possible during unplanned plant outages. The asset work manager also allows for routine maintenance work to possibly be delayed until a turnaround, thus reducing the cost of having to ready a site for two different work cycles.

The benefits of a transparent scope development tool that is accessible to all people in the plant––operations, maintenance, reliability, inspection, environmental, engineering and safety––ensures that there are no surprises, and that unnecessary work is avoided.

TeamWork 2k's work management tool is a robust and complete tool for collecting work to be done on each asset. In addition, electronic links to condition-monitoring (CM) systems provide for automatic generation of environmental and inspection work requests. TeamWork 2k's coordinated, asset-focused work management system ensures that all people in the plant can access, review, add to and comment on any work that is being considered. In addition, TeamWork 2k supports electronic approval cycles that ensure that a record is kept of each business-rule-mandated approval, its date and its approver. TeamWork 2k's document management system also ensures that any backup information for each work request is available by simply accessing the work request itself.

Planning Management

The work that a good planner does is like a warranty that ensures the success of the turnaround. A detailed plan is the basis of a great schedule, as well as an accurate estimate of costs. Your planner's time should be maximized by the provision of a planning system that ensures that he/she spends the majority of his/her time walking the site and discussing the logistical issues with operators, inspectors, etc. The planning tool should be simple and focused on easily collecting the plan data from the planner. A hand-held mobile device is optimal as the planner can accomplish a large amount of planning without returning to his/her desk.

The plan should be integrated directly with the asset work management system that is used for collecting the work scope, as it makes no sense to plan in a different system than your scope development system. This simply invites errors (such as asset number inconsistencies) and requires the maintenance of redundant data in a separate spreadsheet or scheduling program. Using a scheduling program for the planning process puts an undue focus on scheduling issues, when the focus needs to be simply and completely on plan development. Too many schedule-based plans are severely flawed because scheduled-based considerations are included in the plan. Similarly, planning considerations are often trumped by schedule concerns. Certain small duration, but critical, work items may be ignored by a scheduler for being too insignificant when viewed alongside larger duration, big-ticket, schedule items.

TeamWork 2k's simple, planner-focused tool is designed to maximize the bang-for-buck for the time the planner spends with it. With it, a planner creates a work package for an asset. He/she adds detailed work items for each work package. He/she links each work item to ensure that there is a logical flow to the work in the work package. He/she estimates the manpower needed to complete the work item in the estimated timeframe. He/she also estimates the consumable materials as well as delivery timeframes for these. Costs due to specialty work that is needed to complete the work item are also estimated. The complete plan is the foundation of the entire tracking system and must be accurate. TeamWork 2k also includes a status-based change management system. This allows the planner to modify the plan based on newer information as the work progresses.

Scheduling

The scheduling process for a turnaround project takes a well-planned scope of work, marries it to a well defined human and equipment resource availability matrix, and then computes possible dates for each work item in the schedule. A number of dates affect the computation of the schedule, including turnaround periods (which define timeframes within which certain work, such as pre-shutdown work, is done), milestones (which provide target dates and also act as the start and finish of each period), date constraints, logic, duration and progress data dates. Applying resource limits to the availability of manpower and equipment resources further affects the computation of these scheduled dates.

Your system should be able to pretty much automatically (without human intervention) use the data provided by the target milestones and the availability of manpower and equipment to do the scheduling function. Your head planner and turnaround manager working with the contractor planners can provide the information required for scheduling directly to the system.

TeamWork 2k's built-in scheduling engine, SALLE, is the automated scheduler that does the work with data that is provided. It can be set to run automatically at a certain time(s) each day. Sophisticated, priority-based multiple forward pass scheduling ensures that the optimal dates are computed for work items. The result of the schedule is presented in a simple, easy to read milestone variance format. Critical path is determined as the shortest duration from start to finish. Use of resource leveling ensures that many critical paths can emerge in order to help finish the work more quickly.

Communication

A substantial volume of communication types are required during a turnaround, including:

Meeting agendas
Meeting minutes
Scope request spreadsheets turnaround
Contract documents
Training records
Estimates
Engineering drawings

Now look at the distribution lists that seem to be an integral part of every turnaround. A team of clerks will copy incessantly prior to and during a turnaround in order to keep the distribution list supplied with paper. This wasteful approach, rather than a "green" alternative, is required because there is no single system available to each of the turnaround players: the manager, the planners, the foremen, the superintendents, operators, inspectors, safety personnel, contractors, etc. So, give them one system!

TeamWork 2k has all of the tools needed to ensure that your communication gets to its intended recipient. It records the recipient's responses and tracks each issue identified on the communication. If the recipient needs a hard copy, they have that option. It is time to move into the 21st century and use the tools that are available.

Approvals

You really cannot do anything safely in a plant without having the appropriate person sign-off on it. These approvals are often a big reason for demanding that paper be printed. The arrival of electronic signatures has now provided a means for ensuring that all business-rule-based approvals––for expenditure of company funds or for safe work––are tracked accurately (similar to the FedEx electronic signatures).

TeamWork 2k supports the routing of electronic materials for approvals based on a business-rule-based routing map. There is no longer any doubt about whether someone has approved something. A person may assign approval ability to a designee. Approval ability is inherently available to a supervisor. Simply managing all of the approvals centrally, in the same system as the rest of your work is accomplished, is a huge time savings. It also lends an air of high professionalism to the process. It certainly saves a lot of time.

Execution Management

The folks that actually do the work need to be a part of the picture as well. A hand-held mobile wireless system is a critically useful tool for foremen in the field. They can quickly see what needs to be done next. They need to also be able to quickly indicate when they have completed a task or work item. In addition, at the end of their shift they should be able to easily record the people that worked on work items that day. This would save them the tedious and error-prone task of filling out timesheets.

The frontline of the work is where the foreman is often hit with deviations to the plan. Currently, these deviations are often lost as the foreman simply assigns people to the work and it is done right away. This happens because current systems for planning and tracking work are tedious.

TeamWork 2k's execution management tools provide frontline supervision with a tactical advantage to help them get their work done more quickly and far more accurately than they can with current tools and approaches. Tools for accurately collecting scope changes, progress data and actual time expended by labor and equipment are all easily and quickly maintained by foremen. This approach leaves them with more time to actually direct their crews than they currently have available.

Tracking of Costs

Your labor, equipment, materials and contracted expenses are costs that are incurred in real time during the execution phase of the turnaround. When these incurred costs are compared, also in real time, with the earned value (based on progress) and the target costs, the turnaround manager has an extremely useful and effective tool to help in making real-time decisions based on how things are developing in the field. Add to this a real time comparison of the commitments and the expenditures to date, and the manager has a holistic picture of the entire turnaround AFE project. This is the single most important tool that the manager has, and its success in communicating the story is based on the close integration of each data source––scope development, planning, scheduling, execution, purchasing and accounting.

TeamWork 2k provides the tool that accomplishes a complete integration of work management with external accounting and purchasing systems. Electronic integration reduces the need for redundant and error-prone data entry. TeamWork's integration of turnaround tasks enables it to also provide mission-critical, timely decision-support reports for turnaround management. This is also done with a lessened need for costly contracted (temporary) help. Skill building opportunities for plant personnel are enhanced.

Invoice Verification

Your contractor, with 100 people on-site, has just presented you with a bill. This bill is due in a week. His line of credit will not let him have four weeks in a row of these expenses, so it is imperative that you pay him quickly. You need a system that has already tracked the time each of those 100 people spent working. You should know what they worked on. You should know if they worked overtime and whether that was authorized. You should have signed acknowledgment that the equipment that he is billing you was actually on site and used. Also, you need validation that the materials that were delivered were, in fact, received.

TeamWork 2k's timekeeping and tracking modules are integrated with the work scope being executed and provide a tight link between the work done and who did it. As this data is collected in real time from frontline foremen, it is quite accurate––more so than the timesheets and LEMS that are filled after the fact in most scenarios today. With this tool available, you can be confident that your contractors' invoices can be quickly validated and that they will also stand the test of a company audit.

Logistics

Every turnaround has a list of items that must be done in a certain order. These have been developed at each plant––usually as a "lessons learned" process following a turnaround. In order to not have to redundantly re-learn all of these lessons and to help you get things done expeditiously, you can use previously developed checklists and lists.

TeamWork 2k has built-in locations for documentation, as well as numerous locations for note-keeping. These provide a way to ensure that the best practices that you evolve during your turnaround remain readily available to the people that follow you. They will be grateful that you were as thorough and were as attentive to detail as you needed to be. Successful turnarounds will become routine. What a concept!

Work History Retention

A quick review of current paradigms in plant turnarounds will show you that the work history is seldom effectively recorded in the asset's history. This is because a one system was used for scheduling the work and another for managing it. That system was used because there were experts in it available. Now that the turnaround is done, everyone's attention is focused on completing things and getting the costly contractors off the payroll. So, little attention is given to the asset history. "Hey, we have the files, so we have the history, right?" "We can always get someone to add it in later." Yeah, right. This never gets done. And if it is done, it is riddled with errors as it is entered after the fact––and by data entry people who have no memory of the events.

TeamWork 2k has an asset management system at its core. This allows you to manage all asset-focused work in a way that the work is always a part of the asset history––whether the work is already completed or simply being considered. The whole story of the asset is always ready to be viewed at any time.

Conclusion

As you can see, managing a turnaround is a little like being a juggler––with about 100 pins! Still, with the right mix of people and an integrated tool for the job, you should be well on your way to being a successful turnaround manager.

We at the TeamWork Group, Inc. will be glad to make ourselves available, in person or over the Web, to help you decide your options and to help you manage your turnarounds. Our TeamWork associates can be on-site with you and your team to help them build skills that will help you and them "fly solo" in the future.

Please contact us at: cpmonteiro@teamworkgroup.com

Issues faced by Maintenance Managers in Today's Data-centric Work Environment

2009-01-02T10:54:00.001-08:00

Note: All company and product names used in this document are the property of their owners.

Every maintenance department in every company today must carefully manage its asset-related data. The data involved is crucial to the business. It is obvious that handling this data badly costs businesses untold losses in revenue. Severe as this is, it is just the tip of the iceberg of problems caused by bad data management practices. A business's long term viability is often based on the historical data that it collects and uses in order to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated or that improvements based on past lessons are reused. In the medium and short-term it is necessary for businesses to rapidly react to new situations. A database of well-developed and maintained solution scenarios could provide a timely and effective foundation from which to build a reaction strategy.

In this publication, we outline some commonly encountered issues with plants, facilities and all organizations with the responsibility to manage capital infrastructure while in continuous operation. This includes maintenance environments in chemical and petro-chemical plants, paper mills, electric utilities, etc. For each of the issues, we provide a viable solution scenario - which is either currently available from The TeamWork Group's suite of solutions for data management, or is being contemplated as new development.

We welcome input and feedback on our choices of major issues and look forward to discussing other issues that we have not addressed.

Here are a few of the major issues facing the maintenance industry today:

The drive to quickly demonstrate short-term gains
Lack of a consistent standard for obtaining KPI measures
Ineffective preventive maintenance management planning
Inconsistent management of plant shutdowns, turnarounds and outages
Lack of understanding of the concepts of reliability-based maintenance
Non-existence of a complete asset-based work management system
Restrictions imposed by corporate IT governance-related mandates

While not exhaustive, this list provides us with a framework to discuss the reasons for each of these issues and to formulate rational solution scenarios for each. These issues are also not islands unto themselves - many of the factors that contribute to one of these issues are also the cause of others.

Demonstrating Short-term Gains

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s there has been, a rush to demonstrate dramatically improved bottom-lines to stock-holders. This led, in the 1990s to a large number of sales of operating plants to newer, lower cost operators. For example, Unocal sold its refinery assets to Tosco. There were many other such examples. Some companies attempted to shield themselves from the risky refineries by creating newer holding companies such as Equilon and Motiva that would act as holding companies for just the refining assets. The thinking at that time was that operating plants were too risky and that it would be better to shed these companies in favor of less risky investments. The companies that bought these risky assets operated them with fewer resources - which justified the reasons that they were bought in the first place.

However, each of these operating plants is a viable revenue-producing and jobs-providing entity that continues to need the maintenance (TLC) that their designers envisaged when they were first designed, engineered and constructed. The new and current owners of these operating assets are now confronted with the need to do more maintenance with fewer resources. It is now time to improve all of the processes that can be improved while, at the same time, attempting to do more without an increase in staff. Temporary increases in staff are acceptable as a large amount of contracted help is now available in the market. Many of these contractors are composed of and led by personnel that were re-engineered or down-sized from owner companies in the '90s.

Fortunately, concurrent with these momentous shifts in the business environment there was a corresponding huge development in the area of data management and presentation. Client-Server databases became more available to developers in plants and the world-wide web became readily available on the desktops of workers in the plants. For the last 15 years, we have seen the complete transition of the maintenance workforce from using paper forms and filing cabinets to using spreadsheets and electronic folders and files in systems such as Sharepoint. In addition, the need for centralized data management, while ignored for a short time at the beginning of the personal computer era, was quickly filled by the use of ERP systems such as SAP.

So, all should be well from the perspective of data management, right? Nope. Just ask any of the workers in any maintenance department today and you will hear the problems that they have. These problems are the subject of this document and are discussed as they arise.

A short-term approach to the problem of maintenance is a serious flaw in many companies today. Using spreadsheets to manage data in lieu of a carefully designed database is a short-term approach. Using SAP, a system whose strength lies in accounting-related functions, to be the basis of an asset maintenance system, just because you already have it, is another example of short-term thinking. Placing all of your files into Sharepoint because it is there, is another example of short-term, quick-fix thinking. Modern data management allows us to store data and documents with the object (ex. Project, asset) to which it belongs. Sharepoint is simply an electronic filing cabinet. It is not an information manager.

In keeping with the notion of the long-term effectiveness of the plant, we need a long term data management solution. This solution ensures that every bit of information about each physical part of the plant or facility is stored in a manner that ensures that it can be easily and quickly retrieved and reviewed by a maintenance worker. Virtually every piece of data will have a thread that leads it back to an asset or a part of an asset. Asset Management is a long-term, cost-effective fix for a long-running, safely-operating plant.

Consistent standard for obtaining KPI measures

Key Performance Indicators are tools that are developed and used by plant and company personnel to ensure their path to better performance. The development of each of the measures for the KPI's is dependent on carefully thought-out processes. A study of the current situation regarding KPI's in the workplace unearths the fact that most are done with Excel spreadsheets. This means that data is being manually entered into a spreadsheet - without any audit trail to the source of the manually entered data. Sooner or later the spreadsheet data is discovered to not be reliable any longer.

The solution for this issue is discovered in the use of a long-term well designed, well maintained asset management database! All of your data is carefully maintained in your asset database. This should include any work that is planned for, or executed, on the assets in your plant. The data in this database now is the source for your KPI data. There is a direct traceability of data from the source to each of the measures in your KPI graphs. Any other approach simply postpones the day of reckoning - and no one wants to see a plant not perform at its peak of safety and effectiveness.

Preventive Maintenance Management Planning

It is quite logical that routinely performing maintenance on the components of your infrastructure will lead to better long-term results. You certainly do change your furnace filter at home routinely. You change the oil in your car routinely. Scale these preventive maintenance (PM) tasks up to an entire plant and you can see that the possibility for savings is mind-boggling. Yet, these PM tasks are too often allowed to be managed by simplistic scheduling models. These include time-based and meter-based models. Neither of these approaches allow you to factor in the possibility that other issues - such as seasonal (ex. inability to work in the Winter), or conditional (ex. breakdown requires immediate action and a change in the cycle) require a more pro-active approach to the management of preventive maintenance work. Condition monitoring systems help to ensure that each equipment asset's condition is known, but, these systems are seldom integrated with the PM management system. This integration is crucial and should not be left to people to do 'when they can'. Environmental monitoring system as well provide a means for ensuring that equipment assets in need of PM work are quickly and accurately identified. The use of RFID tags should be used to help quickly and accurately identify an asset's history as well as its performance record. This quick and accurate identification of issues will help you to also quickly identify whether an asset should be replaced or maintained in a different way.

An integrated asset management database is, once again, the primary tool that will enable an effective and enduring PM Work Management program to be implemented and maintained. The history that is collected in such a database ensures that there will be fewer surprises in the form of unexpected and un-safe events in an operating plant. Such a database will have an integrated, schedule-based, preventive maintenance, work management system. This system will also be the same one that is used for managing routine maintenance work as well as work in special projects such as turnarounds, and outages. Such a system goes far beyond the scope of existing ERP approaches to maintenance management.

Management of Plant Shutdowns, Turnarounds and Outages

Most operating plants need to be periodically shut down in order to permit maintenance crews to access and repair the plant's assets. The work done leading up to and during the shutdown is often called a Turnaround. Managing short-duration and high-intensity projects such as turnarounds, in an asset-centric environment such as plants and facilities, requires a synergy between project management and maintenance management that is pretty hard to find in off-the-shelf systems such as ERP or Scheduling systems. Consequently, plants today are extremely heavy users of tactical tools such as Excel, MS Project, etc. These tools permit a quick development of solution scenarios. However, in the longer term, these solutions become huge maintenance headaches.

The reasons for this include the absence of standard data integrity management processes that are integral in well designed database solutions. Some of the benefits of an integrated turnaround management tool are:

Asset focused - this ensures that the work and operation history of critical plant assets are an integral part of the system used for planning the work and scheduling the work to be done on these assets. Amazingly, NONE of the popular systems in the marketplace today seem to recognize, let alone support this relationship with assets.

Includes a detailed work plan and estimate development tool - this requires a system of breaking down work into component pieces - while remaining aware of the asset relationships based on the actual processes in the plant. A group of assets in the same process may, potentially be worked on at the same time, based on the fact that the process has to be shut down for work to be done on even one of the assets.

Use of resource-limited scheduling process - this ensures that a reasonable, workable schedule that includes the availability of assets, is the basis of the project work. Again, ERP systems are woefully incapable of supporting a logical and resource-limited process that integrates hundreds of different contractors that each provides their own resources.

Work execution tracking is a commonly ignored aspect of many systems. Again, the evidence of this is the huge number of Excel spreadsheets that are employed in a. assigning work to crews and b. collecting progress and actual hours from crews.

The TeamWork Group's TeamWork 2k application completely addresses all issues that a turnaround manager encounters in managing the project as well as the assets in the plant. More details on the specific aspects of a sound turnaround management system's components will be discussed in a future blog.

Understanding of the concepts of Reliability-centered maintenance

RCM is a proven approach to ensuring that maintenance work is done on assets in a timely manner. The right things are maintained at the right time. TeamWork 2k automatically assimilates all of the work that is done on each asset in the plant. This includes capital work, routine maintenance work, preventive maintenance work, inspection work and condition monitoring-based work as well as turnaround work. Current systems do not address the management of planning, scheduling and the execution of all of these types of work. This makes the task of RCM-based computations extremely hard and forces the organization into onerous, error-prone and incomplete data entry operations.

TeamWork 2k, by managing ALL of the work in an operating plant provides a readily used platform for the computation of all of the KPI and other RCM-based measures. The flexibility of the TeamWork platform enables us to help maintenance management to develop new measures quickly and effectively.

Complete Asset-Based Work Management System

An operating plant is composed of operating units that are themselves composed of processes, each of which involves a slew of assets. Assets are pumps, exchangers, heaters, boilers, condensers, fin-fans, etc. Each of these has to operate in peak condition and in concert with other assets in order to ensure that the plant is operating at peak efficiency. While many maintenance management systems exist, few of them are strongly focused not only on maintaining a list of the assets but also on the inclusion of operating and maintenance information about the assets. Building a work and history management system based on your assets is a crucially important aspect of a great data management system for your plant.

The TeamWork 2k system has at its core a suite of asset-management tables that allow the plant to build effective and complete work management processes on top of the asset data. This closes the loop of data and ensures that workers are always aware of each of the different aspects of factors that affect a particular asset - whether it is working or in the shop for repair.

Corporate IT Governance

In the chaos of new system development and failed installations in the 1990s and 2000s, corporations have evolved in-house governance system to ensure that strict controls are maintained on company systems. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and TSX regulations have contributed to a closer scrutiny of processes that are associated with the financial management of corporations.

A downside of the governance practices that have evolved to meet these needs is that the pace of change in a maintenance organization's data management tools is excruciatingly slow. This results in - you guessed it - an explosion in the use of spreadsheets to accomplish what a good data management system should.

In order to help organizations to explore the latest in modern maintenance management data technology, we now host our application and database on secure managed servers that are accessible online. The cost of using these solutions online is a fraction of the cost of bringing them in-house and building a support structure for them. Once a customer is familiar with how the systems work, they can decide to bring it in-house or continue to use it online. Either way, the unknown of how the system will perform with real data is completely removed and leaves the company with a much less risky proposition when looking for the best maintenance management system.

Do you work in a PUSHY environment? Or a Reluctant one?

2008-12-17T05:42:00.001-08:00

Does your company or department push to get new processes in place? Or does it need to be dragged (reluctantly?) into adopting new systems and processes?

Understanding the environment that you operate in helps to ensure that you can help your company to adapt to appropriate new technologies that will dramatically affect your company's bottom line.

I have been fortunate to have worked with a few people that are pushers. They push to get their vision implemented. These people seem to have no fear. No fear of the consequences of any fall-out from how their 'bucking the system' will affect their careers. They are comfortable with their knowledge of their business and of their role in it. They understand technology and what it can do for them. Interestingly, they are doing really well - despite being periodically interrupted by the 'powers-that-be'. These people are always business-focused people. They are on the front-line of executing the work and managing the workforce. Their attention to the business model is the reason for their company's on-going success. There are many people like this in companies today.

Their counterparts, those that need to be pulled, are the reluctant ones. These people are the followers. They tend to allow the 'powers-that-be' dictate to them exactly what they will do and how they will do it.

In order to function effectively, corporations require more pushers than reluctants. The pushers are the visionaries. They sell the followers on their vision of how the business can improve. It is clear that corporations with a culture of pushing are more successful than those that are afraid of change. Freedom to innovate is a hallmark of a pushy organization.

Who are the 'powers-that-be'? In our business - providing software tools for work management - they are responsible for managing systems for the owner corporation. Let's refer to these people as the 'system managers'. Our software systems are designed to help the companies and departments that use them to build and implement better work management processes. The business is qualitatively improved by using such tools. System Managers too often focus on 'standards' as a means for ensuring consistency in the employment of systems. This approach ignores the realities of the problems that the business needs to solve. It allows the system managers to justify their choice of 'standard' systems to justify their selections.

Companies that abdicate the use of trend-setting approaches to managing their business are doomed to being in a follower mode. They are not the trend-setters of their industry.

As a provider of work management software tools, we at The TeamWork Group, welcome opportunities to work with 'pushy' organizations. In fact, these organizations stand to gain the most from the adoption of the progressive data management tools that we have dedicated ourselves to developing.

The TeamWork Group is working to make it easier for pushy organizations to access the tools that they need to continually improve business processes. We are making our tools available of the web. This means that the tools needed by pushy departments and companies can be utilized and can contribute to an improved bottom-line without upsetting the 'power-that-be'. You will not need to get approval for installing 'non-standard' software on company systems.

Does this sound too good to be true? The TeamWork Group provides systems that use industry-standard software from Microsoft, Sybase and Oracle to develop our tools. This ensures that we can easily co-exist with other software on in-house systems.

Be on the lookout for invitations to use TeamWork 2k on a trial basis. This try-before-you-buy is another really useful aspect of the web-based tools.

Other advantages that you can realize from The TeamWork Group's web-based work management solutions include:

Work management processes;
Asset-based work and project management;
Cost tracking, forecasting and management;
Turnaround, Shutdown, Outage, Slowdown management;
Incident, Issue, backlog management;
Time Management - including rate management and timesheets;
Gate management - including tracking of on-site time;
Routine maintenance management of your plant or facility assets;
Management of the procurement cycle;
Management of EPC projects
Many other tools that customers need to help reduce spreadsheet spread and database bloat