Smarter Commissioning is Key to Reducing Risk, Cost and Chaos in Capital Projects
When discussing the challenges of delivering large capital projects on time, on budget and at the expected quality level, the topic of completions and commissioning rarely comes up. Yet, they are crucial to managing all three.
To quote the conclusion of a report by the Construction Industry Institute, “Commissioning failures are too common in frequency and extremely costly in impact. The business case for action is clear, yet the transitions between construction, pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup and close-out remain challenging, primarily due to contractual separations and the multitude of organizational interfaces and handoffs.”
Avoiding these commissioning failures requires understanding why this phase is commonly overlooked and overshadow by earlier phases of a capital project, and how a smarter, integrated approach can turn commissioning into a driver of success.
Anatomy of an Overlooked Commissioning Phase
The Construction Industry Institute’s report came out before the pandemic, but its conclusions still apply today. Too often, commissioning or readiness-to-operate is treated as an afterthought, something to handle once mechanical completion is done.
The first consequence of such an approach is the timeline. The commissioning phase often experiences delays cascading from the ripple effects of prior milestones such as engineering, procurement and construction stages. This adds pressure and urgency to an already complex and painstaking process.
Late preparation also adds to the problem. Commissioning schedules need to be created early in the project to sync with other teams but, in practice, they are often developed late in the project. And, all too often, field personnel encounter issues such as missing, incomplete, or outdated information, which makes their job harder as they rush through large numbers of unverified systems.
Finally, to conduct this process, they will typically use multiple third-party tools, scattered files and unstandardized approaches that lead to errors, lack of visibility and headaches down the line.
In short, it’s a high-risk, high-cost, low-visibility race around the clock, both for the EPC and the owner operator. And, if your completion and handover process is very reactive and paper-based, it’s difficult to learn from it and get consistently and predictably better.
Building a Digital Foundation to Commissioning Success
Unsurprisingly, many major players have realized there has to be a better way forward.
Today, leading EPCs and owner-operators are seeking to reduce the cost and uncertainty of the turnover process, standardize planning and execution, and apply a repeatable framework across projects.
A particularly powerful strategy is to pair a digital twin of the project with a collaborative, data centric solution such as Intergraph Smart® Completions. This approach ensures that completions are embedded into every milestone of the capital project—starting early in the engineering phase. Progress is tracked in real time, documentation is managed effectively, each component is properly commissioned before the final stage, and all punch lists are cleared. Finally, QA/QC digital certificates are in place to support an on-time, on-budget startup or plant turnaround.
A Material Impact on Project Performance
A digitized completion and commissioning process has a material impact on both CAPEX and OPEX performance.
Organizations can reduce execution setup costs by 70%, administrative costs by 45% to 50%, and decrease overall capital expenditures by 1%. That may seem small, but this rapidly adds up to tens of millions in large-scale capital projects. On the OPEX side, operational readiness becomes far more efficient, with Request for Operations (RFO) effort reduced by 10% to 20%, and an accelerated transition to live operations. Schedules also benefit, with a 98% reduction in turnover/handover compilation time.
Importantly, a solution like Smart Completions brings structure, not rigidity. We’ve seen it implemented on projects of all sizes, including the largest mega-projects with thousands of active users on any given month. And, with a proven track record across geographies and industries, from oil and gas to utilities, mining, nuclear or chemicals, you can rapidly make gains rather than reinvent the wheel.
Discover how Smart Completions can enhance projects of any size by learning more here.