Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote
Let’s connect on LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/robertmote
The path I have taken through my career stems from the power of great calculations and making sure I achieve that on every job. It has become a habit. A great calculation is far better than the drawing. It has the power to show confidence, clarity and communicate across disciplines and task-specific roles. It has a greater role to educate. To educate the graduates, the client and the average person. I am aware many clients, project managers and engineers have never seen such possibilities or will ever believe the attributes of great calculations will be necessary in their project.
A question I often surprise engineers with is, do you like doing calculations? How would you answer? How much power and impact do your calculations create?
I want to take you through a snapshot of some of the real megaprojects that have benefitted from the power of great calculations.
Case Study 1: Eighty Piperacks in six Months with Workshare teams
Case Study 2: Prolific Compressor Foundations Design
Case Study 3: Material Database Development and +200 piperacks
Case Study 1: Design of eighty piperack in six months with workshare teams.
Project: Horizon Project
Client CNRL, Alberta
For a major project in Northern Alberta, I coordinated a workshare team of ten engineers and eight designers, based in New Delhi. The target was engineering and design for eighty piperacks in six months, including foundation, steel and concrete.
The clients were skeptical it was achievable. This strategy was as much an economical decision as well as political (share the blame) and the head office in Calgary had no extra people to do the work. I volunteered for the suicide mission. I was invited to New Delhi for six months but I felt it would be on their terms not mine. I insisted on only two weeks to meet, learn, teach and align the workshare team.
Within the two weeks, they learned to improve their productivity. The engineers re-focused their attention on the calculations, the procedure, the checking and the teamwork effort driven by the new method. I will explore in another post the ingredients for a successful workshare.
The typical piperack calculation that was originally over two hundred pages became less than forty. The calculations for the piperack foundation designs now took two weeks. The engineering team were aligned and conceptualized the design, rationalizing it across all the piperacks in their scope. This exercise reduced the basic requirements to twelve standard designs and two specials. One team handled the concept layout, assumptions, piperack foundations and the basic load cases; the structural model was then passed to another team to generate the steel design and connection forces. They swapped roles for QA roles, the concreters checking steelers and steelers checking foundations. Either team checked connections and final pipe stress information.
The designers were able to use the calculations actively and mark changes as required and the final checking and the QA/QC review was a considerably easier process. The calculations were consistent with the modeling and the drawings. The team was transformed by the experience. Where they were stressed and concerned how to meet the ambitious targets now they were energized, enthusiastic and ready to do it again.
The team was taught the MS Word and Excel elements of the Mote Method.
The cost-savings was in excess of 3 million USD, no rework and completion on time.
Case Study 2: Prolific Compressor Foundation Designs
Project: PO11 Project,
Client: Lyondell , Rotterdam
On a major project in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, many compressor foundations were becoming due for completion in design milestones but there were no consulting engineers available to complete the task as we were heading into the holiday season. We were looking at a six week delay for each of the eight foundations. The civil team re-focused and looked in-house for the solution.
While working on another project, I was invited to complete the design in my spare time. I used previously developed, and approved, spreadsheets for analyzing compressor foundation designs. The spreadsheets were reconfigured for the new soil properties and vendor information. Each compressor foundation took eight hours to program and generate the final calculations. In the one month of August, all eight major foundations were designed, completed, reviewed and approved.
This was a significant improvement for the project progress during a notoriously difficult holiday phase where productivity was expected to be lower than normal.
The cost-savings were in excess of 800,000 USD, the designs were peer-reviewed and approved. The schedule recovery effort was recognised by the client.
This prolific effort based on experience involved MS Word, Excel and VBA and is the very heart of the Mote Method.
Project: SGI/SGP Project
Client: TengizChevroil, Kazakhstan
Some years later, I repeated this exercise on a project in Kazakhstan (TCO SGI/SGP project), which involved over thirty pumps/compressors and major reciprocators.
The calculation format was user-friendly for translation work so state approval was obtained in record time. The Mote Method was a significant advantage over hand produced calculations, in translation work. The largest compressor in Kazakhstan was also designed and peer-reviewed using the Mote Method.
The cost-savings were in excess of 2 million USD.
Case Study 3: Material Take off Database Development and Piperack Designs.
Project: Firebag 3+ Project
Client: Suncor Energy
While building the Estimate Design (EDS) database in Excel, I was also training an Indian workshare team to produce piperack design calculations for the early works package. This involved over two hundred piperacks and the design period was one year. I reprised what I learned from Case Study 1 but now with a bigger team in Mumbai.
Back in Calgary,the EDS database was a plot plan view of the project with hyperlinks to quantities on worksheet for specific packages of work. The project was split into five different areas, each with their own team and each team was taught how to populate the database with specific rules. The teams were being trained in the Excel component. The EDS database concept was a stunning success and a great tool. It was designed to give material breakdown by engineering work packages so that it would track the variation of planned and actual quantities between initial estimates and final design. The Civil/Structural team met every target for submitting data, quantities and uniformity. The act of checking, auditing and reviewing were regular scheduled events. All the engineers were now trained and aligned on Excel and the project expectations for calculations, which helped them as they moved into the design phase.
In the meantime, the Indian workshare team were coming to grips with the new ideas and reducing the typical design from over three hundred pages to forty. I joined them in Mumbai, for two weeks and trained a group of thirty engineers and designers. They were taught Word, Excel and VBA.
The early works program for the piperack designs was initiated and over a period of one year, every calculation and drawing was issued on time with no rework. All connection forces were annotated onto general arrangement drawings in the calculations for the connection design by fabricators. All calculations were formally filed and collected within two weeks of drawing approval. They set the benchmark for the rest of the engineering teams in Calgary, Charleston and Edmonton.
The structural design was so consistent, the fabricators looked for ways to streamline the steel delivery schedule from sixteen weeks to twelve weeks. The schedule compression resulted from the fantastic effort of the engineering teams to produce prolific calculations.
The project was so successful that structural engineers wanted to join because of the on-the- job training and the excitement that existed within the structural team. It is not uncommon that large projects often suffer in image due to the scale, time and inertia involved so much so that the engineer perceives boredom. The truth is large projects have the best opportunity for delivering productivity, as a small budget in training engineers, can go such a long way over the lifetime of the project, not only for the productivity in the project but also the engineer’s professional development.
Next time you do a calculation, think about the power you have and the real impact you can make. I love it.
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Anthony Fasano, P.E., aka Your Professional Partner, founded Powerful Purpose Associates after he realized that it was the development of his soft skills that helped him to become an associate partner at a reputable engineering firm at the young age of 27. With history as a civil engineer, Anthony is now a nationally recognized executive coach and inspirational speaker, specializing in the areas of engineering career development, as well as leadership. He uses his highly effective coaching and speaking techniques through affordable programs to help engineers develop their soft skills, work through blocks, prioritize effectively, set clear goals and achieve their maximum potential.
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