Advanced Work Packaging in capital projects: a standardized model for EPC Contractors

Abstract

The international context in which the major EPC Contractors operate is going through a period of profound transformation. The increasing complexity of the plants, the increasing costs of labor, the increasingly binding contractual requirements, have forced companies around the world to adapt to these market laws and raise the level of competitiveness through targeted business strategies. The main EP&C realities, national leader in the Oil & Gas sector, are constantly moving towards new process management techniques. The following work fits into this context by analyzing and deepening the process of breaking down the scope of work into the so-called Work Packages according to the Advanced Work Packaging methodology. AWP envisages a prioritization of the work, initially agreed between the various disciplines, with the ultimate aim of increasing performance in terms of time, cost, quality and alignment of the three macro-phases: Engineering, Procurement and Construction. After a thorough research on the previous bibliography, we analyzed the current process of management and decomposition of the scope of work. The result is an AWP application model, which, through modifications to the current management processes, provides a quantitative calculation tool to assess the amount of construction work related to a plant. The proposal is also extended to the engineering and procurement phase. This completely standardized process has a general validity and has been demonstrated through the application of two main projects. In the final part, the procedure was extended to all the types of systems made by Tecnimont, further demonstrating the extreme versatility of the methodology.