Design challenges of major engineering projects,
Based on our experience on major projects across industries and geographies,
here are the most common challenges we’ve helped our clients solve through technology.
Mismanagement of dependency
During the engineering phase of a project,
multidisciplinary dependencies accumulate to result in significant schedule slippages across many levels of design documentation.
The problem is that a delay in any of these drawings can delay the work of the entire project.
For example, if someone’s main architectural drawing is not ready and is not approved in time,
the structural drawings will also be delayed, which in turn will delay everything downstream.
Because without approved structural drawings, HVAC, plumbing and electrical work cannot be completed.
As a result, a late drawing in the engineering phase can easily turn into significant delays in the construction phase .
Collaboration between work teams
Identifying and managing dependencies between teams is an ongoing process from the beginning of a project to its end,
and if there is a high degree of collaboration, it is possible to manage dependencies proactively.
For example, an organization that is able to facilitate concurrent engineering through distributed teams (by adopting the right culture,
processes, and technology)
It will be able to ensure its engineering teams accelerate engineering work.
Unfortunately, in many project teams, there is no proper collaboration between disciplines because:
Lack of digitization of processes
Incompatibility of the systems used
Cultural differences
Non-standard document templates
Standardizing document templates helps:
Good quality
Reduce rework
Improve reusability
Facilitates digitization
But most projects today still lack this standardization.
Manual configuration management
Configuration management of engineering documents is still mostly done manually,
as this will increase the chance of different people using different versions of the same document, leading to rework and delays.
Skip the gates
Without an automated, workflow-based process for document approvals (which would have ensured that no steps were skipped),
it is difficult to monitor progress;
Because in the manual document approval process,
the chances of skipping steps are high and by the time errors are discovered and the document has progressed to other stages.
This can lead to huge losses, due to non-conformance.
Lack of standardization of the review process
The first reason here is that there is no definition of the review process itself, but in reality, even if the processes were standardized,
the sheer volume of documents and number of reviews makes it difficult to manage reviews and manually review the inclusion of comments.
Improper change management
During the engineering phase, changes are inevitable,
and the ability to manage changes quickly and efficiently is key to engineering productivity.
The factors that hinder change management are:
Lack of unified change management processes
Inability to quickly identify affected items due to lack of tracking capabilities
Different definitions of progress and reporting
Many teams operate without pre-defined credit rules, which leads to inconsistency in progress reporting.
It is best practice in the industry to monitor progress in real time using “S” curves of planned versus achieved progress
, to achieve this it is necessary to;
Preset approval rules for each stage of the document workflow