Mario Tommaselli, Senior Vice President One T.EN Delivery and Raffaele Ingrosso, Vice President Delivery Excellence explain.
Can you tell us about the eProject within the T.EN global Delivery organization?
Mario Tommaselli (MT): One T.EN Delivery (OTD) is the global organization within Technip Energies that is focused on delivering projects from our operating centers around the world. A key mission of this organization is the harmonization and standardization of processes and project executions with new methods and tools. Delivery Excellence is the function within OTD tasked with this. All our projects rely on the use of data. The ambition of eProject is to automate and digitalize data transfers among the various disciplines within the operating centers and between multiple operating centers to ensure that we are using the consistent and robust data, whatever the location or function.
Raffaele Ingrosso (RI): Delivery Excellence is a global function which includes engineering, project management and construction. Our role is to support the business with methodologies, work processes and tools to execute projects and improve performance. The eProject is a 3-year program to innovate the way we work. By pushing forward new and more agile methods, more digital execution of our transversal EPC work processes, from order entry to completion, we will keep excelling in delivering projects – that is our goal.
How does the eProject contribute to the Energy Transition?
MT: Energy transition projects tend to be smaller and faster which facilitates and requires digitalization also because they contain an important element of repetition. When you capture this through digital execution, you can speed up the time to market of each of these projects.
At the same time the eProject remains focused on our traditional business on larger projects such as LNG, Ethylene, Petrochemicals, etc. These projects involve managing a huge amount of information among disciplines, centers, project stakeholders. Digitalization allows faster time to market which clients are very keen on, and project delivery completed with all pertinent information in digital format.
How do you achieve standardization in projects which by their nature are made to measure?
MT: We can’t fully standardize the content of our projects because each one has certain different features with its own specificities, but within each project there are work processes that can be standardized and automated. There are certain repetitive elements within the complexity of project work processes, where digitalization works quickly and easily. In addition, collecting, storing and processing project data in an organized and standardized way allows the use of artificial intelligence to open up a whole range of new opportunities during the project execution and beyond after hand over, from efficiency savings to predictive maintenance.
Can you give us some examples of eProject deliverables?
RI: We are working on four major functionalities: i) the piping chain – from design to the issuance of the material requisition for purchasing, ii) product data management – which is related to the process and engineering design for static equipment, iii) steel structure management from design to requisition, and iv) tagging, to be able to track whatever object is in the plant.
Our goal is to eliminate waste, to avoid time spent on low-value activities such as retrieving, reconciling, editing and reporting information, through enhanced data management, freeing up time for more value-creative activities.
What are the benefits for clients?
RI: The benefits are doing the same things with less manhours and faster. In the example of the piping chain, from design to requisition, we estimate that engineers can save around 20% of time. By shortening the overall execution of this activity, the time to market for this specific activity is shortened.
MT: Digitalization is a key element of the battle for competitiveness. We assess the digitalization of each functionality for cost benefits in a very wide sense, not just monetary, but also in terms of schedule improvement. And this is what our clients are looking for. Moreover, having the data structured and easily accessible has the potential to open other fields of data analysis which are not available today. Artificial intelligence, when properly applied, can predict certain things based on past project experience. It helps us to become more efficient, having a deliverable earlier or cheaper, and it helps our clients to optimize their operations.
Going digital and sharing data is at the heart of One T.EN Delivery; it represents the cement and the shared language of our global delivery organization.