Pull Planning System to Coordinate the Engineering Procurement and Construction on Process Plant Projects

摘要

Process-Plant projects are inherently complex and successful delivery requires effective coordination of multi-disciplinary teams across project phases. While each major project phase-Engineering, Procurement & Construction will have a preferred sequence of deliverables, this sequence will be disrupted due to constrains and requirements of other phases. Field studies on ongoing projects showed that there were significant delays in construction of the piping package due to delays in design and construction of Structural and Civil packages. Further analysis of the delays revealed that the engineering for Structural and Civil components were not sequenced appropriately due to lack of information on construction sequence and priority. The availability of information on the detailed construction sequence will enable the engineering/procurement teams to synchronize their work based on these requirements. Aligning the sequence of upstream activities to meet the needs of downstream requirements is a result of pull planning and is a basic concept in Lean Thinking. One of the challenges in implementing pull planning for the current situation was that that appropriate sequencing information had to flow from the construction to engineering and procurement. Further, this information had to be structured to ensure that the network of appropriate upstream stakeholders is appraised on the specific downstream requirements. In order to structure the information, a schema for mapping spatial and information dependency between the various disciplines was developed. The schema was implemented using a relational database platform along with querying features and a user-interface. The system was tested using data from an on-going project and it was found that the results supported the implementation of pull-planning and enabled better coordination of upstream activities to support construction requirements.