Ed Feck and Bruno Lavoie
What can you do to improve labor productivity from the very beginning of a project? According to Ed Feck, turnaround manager for Tesoro Corp., the start of the engineering phase is “a huge window of opportunity” for “team alignment” project leaders would be wise not to squander.
“It’s a time for alignment and getting commitment from the various teams involved: the capital team, turnaround team, site management,” Feck explained. “It’s a window of opportunity that can easily escape, because site management has a lot of priorities besides something that’s coming two or three years from now.
“If you’re really able to work together with the capital team to articulate how important it is to set the stage and — with respect to engineering — to lay out and select the options, if you can just give that to the capital team with a decent amount of time before the event comes, that can really help them succeed in get-ting adequate preparation.”
NOVA Chemical’s Director of Manufacturing East Growth Projects Bruno Lavoie seconded Feck’s comments, emphasizing a “construction-driven approach” to scheduling can help facilitate a productive dialogue between teams. Both spoke recently at the 2016 Petrochemical Engineering & Construction Conference and Expo in New Orleans.
“What I’ve seen on projects I’ve worked successfully is this alignment,” Lavoie said. “So if you can actually get your construction team in early with the engineers in what we call an ‘integrated planning session,’ that’s really how you get the two sides to have some meaningful discussion as to what’s feasible. What does construction really need, and can it actually be achieved by the engineers?
“You can get into these back-and-forths where at the end of the day you have real alignment between the engineers and the constructor, and that’s the first step. Being able to make that alignment plan early on is critical.”
Another way to encourage early team alignment is by teaching from past mistakes, Feck pointed out.
“If you’re able to show from a prior event what went well and what didn’t go well, and if you’re able to tie that back to some of those key actions that could have been decided 24-36 months in advance and how you really want to make those hap-pen for this event, to address not having those things happen in the future is very helpful,” Feck explained. “So part of it is the journey — being able to articulate and sustain and understand the whole journey of what it takes to have a great event.”
Feck and Lavoie also discussed the role of commissioning teams in early event planning, again stressing the importance of integration and communication for establishing a realistic duration expectation.
“Industry best practice is to involve your operation and commissioning team essentially in the front-end stages,” said Lavoie. “At some point you have to have a system in place to bring in your commissioning team early and develop a high-level commissioning plan, as well as start to do system definitions, so when the construction team maps all their high-level plans, they can keep that in mind.”
“It’s really about getting an early understanding of how much time we’re talking about in order to integrate duration focus and make sure we include that time,” added Feck. “That’s the initial alignment of the duration expectation. And if we don’t have a good feel for that four months out, we’re in trouble.”
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