Hydrocarbon Processing - November 2021 - 30

Engineering and
Construction
S. WYSS, Bechtel Corp., Houston, Texas
Materials management: Data-centric execution
to enhance organizational productivity-Part 2
In Part 1, the broad concept of materials management was
discussed, along with materials management as an investment
and attitude. Part 1 also provided several examples that communicate
the hidden costs of poor materials management
execution. Part 2 will show how data-centric execution, with
object-oriented focus and exposure to a common data environment
(CDE), fosters elevation out of detrimental siloed document-centric
execution; how collaboration among all transactional
parties via a CDE-not just engineering, procurement,
construction and project controls, but also suppliers, service
providers and the owner/client-can facilitate efficient project
execution; and several areas where a forward-thinking materials
management team can identify and drive transformational work
process opportunities via an object-oriented approach to offer
significant productivity enhancements.
Transition from document-centric to data-centric/
object-oriented execution. Materials acquisition on capital
projects has historically been a tortured process, where engineering
design evolves by project facility and where materials are first
quantified by the facility. Quantities then need to be morphed
into supply-chain-related commodity groups, irrespective of
facility and managed not by the facility but by commodity to
achieve cost-effective acquisition. The procurement organization
manages this acquisition by commodity, even having to suboptimize
commodity management by supplier. Since construction
builds not by commodity but by facility, the management of
acquired materials must morph back to a facility-based system.
Today's document-centric execution is a throwback to the
pre-computer days where procurement organizations were basically
blind to upstream engineering activity until design evolved
to a maturity where engineering could issue material requisitions
(documents). The construction team was blind to planning construction
execution until it had access to drawings (documents),
purchase orders (documents), shipping notices (documents),
and warehouse receipts and inventory (documents). In effect,
document-centric project execution proceeded in blocks and
chunks of information that were sometimes a surprise to the
downstream party. In a data-centric environment, project execution
proceeds in finite incrementations, with downstream parties
only surprised if they are not monitoring upstream activity.
In a data-centric environment-with a CDE accessible to all
parties via discipline-specific automated tools, where objects
(i.e., materials) possess a fully defined set of attributes, and each
attribute is owned by a subdiscipline-all parties have access to
the latest status of each object. Where the CDE is attached to
a building information model (BIM), all users can visualize the
object via a model viewer (giving perspective to the relative importance
of the object) and understand the relationship of that
object to other objects (FIG. 4).
The key element in this data-centric environment that removes
the informational blinders fundamental to a document-centric
environment is the data maturity attribute. In a data-centric, object-oriented
environment, objects (e.g., valves, instruments, vessels
and pumps) are the pivot point, as opposed to being a component
of a document in a document-centric environment. All
objects are assigned attributes relative to their nature, inclusive of
design, scheduling, acquisition and installation, with disciplinespecific
data maturity attributes being pivotal (FIG. 5).
FIG. 4. Data-centric execution/CDE.
30 NOVEMBER 2021 | HydrocarbonProcessing.com
How does this impact project execution? Procurement
organizations no longer need to wait for a material requisition
(MR) document from the engineering team. All technical aspects
of an object requiring acquisition are defined by object attributes,
inclusive of a design maturity attribute that allows the
procurement team to harvest the information from the CDE
when engineering advances the object's design maturity attribute
to a milestone where the engineering and procurement
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