Читать книгу Practical Risk Management for EPC / Design-Build Projects - Walter A. Salmon - Страница 39

A great deal of the loss experienced on EPC Projects is caused by the need to redo work, and much of that reworking is caused by the lack of integrated working between the various Discipline Engineers within the Project's Engineering Team (such as Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Civil Engineers, etc.). This can often lead to such problems as:

1 delays in the Engineering work due to the need to redo drawings, plus associated extra costs,

2 purchasing of wrong materials, goods, and equipment,

3 late ordering of the correct materials, goods, and equipment,

4 taking down and disposal of wrongly installed components (and, sometimes, demolition of work already completed), and

5 consequent loss of time on the Project's Critical Path.

All too often, this situation arises because there is no effective way for information (documents, drawings, and data) sharing between the various Engineering Disciplines, each operating with different specialised systems that do not readily ‘talk’ to each other.⁹ This is supported in the statement contained in the document titled ‘An Introduction to ISO 15926’: ‘Any who have worked in an engineering environment will know that there is more than one CAD application in common use, and that on a large project all business partners do not always use the same one’.¹⁰ This lack of system integration inevitably leads to Engineering delays that then impact horribly on both Procurement and Construction activities. As the need to reduce costs and improve efficiency in the construction industry increases, it will become increasingly important for Engineering Departments to sharpen up and ensure that lack of inter-disciplinary dialogue and communication does not contribute to the occurrence of unnecessary rework.

This will inevitably require a Contractor to invest in a good quality enterprise-wide Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) that is capable of allowing documents and drawings to be shared between all Departments in real time, so that every Project participant can be well-informed at all times. However, this can prove to be a problem for those many Contractors who do not have their own internal Engineering design capability and, instead, sublet the Engineering design work to third parties. The resultant communication gap does not allow the Contractor to obtain enough real-time knowledge at any point to have confidence about the timely delivery of the Engineering outputs. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Engineering mistakes are very often not discovered until as late as the commissioning stage, when the problem becomes an embarrassment, as well as being more costly and time consuming to rectify.