Jerry Gipson of Dow was next on the agenda.  In addition to being one of the biggest chemical companies in the world, Dow is also one of the biggest EPCs in the world.  But how does Dow prepare for the challenges that a large scale chemical manufacturer faces?  Jerry used the analogy of preparing for an impending storm.  Could be a physical storm as we saw here in Houston not too long ago, or it could be the recent tumult in financial markets or the everyday challenges faced in plant design and construction.  Safety is also critical to Dow, which has a safety culture that has successfully and steadily driven down incidents such as injury, illness, and accidents over the past several years. 

Dow has a build and modify facility work process (B&MF) for its projects that asks the central question, “Are we designing for what we want to accomplish with this asset?”  One key way that Dow determines this is to drive more collaboration and more shared intent with the IT department.  Dow also ensures that engineering data supports ALM, and Jerry acknowledged that the FIATECH organization is bringing the company together and is driving a shared understanding and associated shared outcomes.  According to Jerry, “If we look at the aftermath of the storm, we can see its exposed flaws.  What can we do to execute the next time to avoid some of these flaws?”  To Dow, ALM is delivery of sustainability.”

PetroCanada Looks for ALM Operational Readiness in the Canadian Oil Sands

Jim Simpson of Petro Canada discussed how his company is developing business processes and systems that will be used in new Fort Hills oil sands project.  Fort Hills is an integrated mining project and is a world scale open pit mine.  They use a large bitumen extraction plant to separate bitumen from sand and produce 140 thousand barrels per day of synthetic crude.  With a staff of 2,000 in the far north, a lack of local resource, and high turnover, the overall demographics mean that the staff for PetroCanada will be increasingly younger and less experienced.  The tough operating conditions including extreme low temperatures and abrasive oil sands add to the operating challenges. 

This means that PetroCanada needs to establish key strategies and develop and state their end state targets.  The company also had to develop a risk managed plan to reach their goal, which meant implementing simplified and standardized processes.  They needed to automate as much as possible and make that automation scalable, repeatable, and shorten the learning curve. 

This means developing processes and systems in advance of the business need.  These processes and systems are developed in four phases, starting with the basics and adding on more complexities over time.  Each phase is approximately one year.  Asset information is an early target, and is recognized as a priority early in the program.  O&M information needs to be delivered to the end user at their fingertips in multiple formats.  But who is the end user?  They include engineers, IT folks, operators, maintenance folks, etc.  Handover programs are not enough. Project and vendor information does not equal O&M information.  Recommended does not equal accepted or optimized.  Recommended procedures and processes need review and revision.  In the delivery stage, according to Jim, “some assembly is required”, including preparing the data, preparing documents, assembling and connecting them all together, and then delivering them to end users. 

This process must be repeated as required to stay current.  Jim’s advice to EPCs was to keep delivering accurate information.  There is still a lot of work to do on the part of the owner operator after the information is received.  Early delivery of selected information to the owner operator can reduce risk and shorten time to startup.  Owner operators will always need to transform, supplement, structure and deliver information to meet their specific requirements for safe reliable operation.  In many cases, the effort to do this is not well understood and vastly underestimated. 

First Panel Discussion: Answering the Big Questions

The first panel discussion of the morning was moderated by Richard Jackson of FIATECH.  Jim Humphries of Fluor, Jerry Gipson, Craig Llewellyn of Emerson Process Management, Scott Hillman of Honeywell, and Blair Wheeler of AspenTech all sat on the panel.  The overarching discussion revolved around the questions of what the vision of ALM should be, what are the benefits and challenges and what is needed to attain that vision.  Jim Humphries noted that most people are using stage gate processes such as Front End Loading (FEL) 1, 2, and 3, but there is no clear definition of what is required in those stages.  No clear definition of the inputs.  What is the IT infrastructure?  How do you go about building it into a standard process?  Processes are facilitated by a set of integrated tools that are built for purpose.  There are a lot of generic tools, but they are not optimized for the needs of capital project execution.  Owner Operators (O/Os), EPCs, and suppliers need a common view of what those stage gate processes are and can then develop common processes and tools.