The Information Handover Challenge in Capital Projects

• Category: Blog
• Tuesday, 09 October 2012 05:00
• Written by Herb Hadley - Global EAM Practice Lead, Director Solutions Development

A report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) estimated annual losses of $15.8 billion from information-related issues in capital projects. These losses were incurred as a direct result of inadequate interoperability between project data and the information systems used during the asset life cycle, especially between design, construction, handover, and the systems used to support asset operations.

 
Capital projects can range drastically in size, complexity and cost. For example, a plant renovation (brownfield) might cost $5 million whereas a new production facility (greenfield) could cost $50 billion or more. In all cases, the challenge of achieving efficient and effective capital project information handover is daunting, and the impact of failure can be significant. Most analysts agree that the average loss due to poorly managed information handover can exceed one percent of the total capital project expenditure. For example, a $1 billion project could avoid a loss of $10 million or more.

In many cases, the underlying business processes of capital project information handover have changed little from the days when information handover was accomplished via boxes of paper documents.

There are several reasons why managing information handover from construction to operations is a formidable and labor-intensive task.

• The volume of information transferred is enormous. With a typical $1 billion capital project having 200,000 or more discrete pieces of equipment (tags), the number of associated documents and information records can easily exceed 20 million.
• There can be hundreds of information sources such as engineers, fabricators, constructors, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers. The information received from these sources can be incomplete, consist of errors and exist in multiple structures and formats.
• The changes to information during design, construction and commissioning, are innumerable. Ensuring that the correct versions of the appropriate information are included in the handover is a serious challenge.

Learn the full story by downloading our free whitepaper Achieving Big Savings on Capital Project Information Handover.