The EPC ecosystem is very complex. Multiple parties are involved, and internal and external teams in each party work across regions and offices with the shared goal of executing projects on schedule, on budget, and with excellent quality. As the distributed working model gained momentum in 2020 with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and businesses were forced to allow most or all of their employees to work from home or from different locations, how did project organizations with already tight timelines and budgets manage to stay in business? How can they scale up now?
1. Large-sized documents and large numbers of documents
An EPC project’s many documents are generated and reviewed by multiple stakeholders. Because of their quantity and size, data-sharing becomes a challenge if team members happen to be also working from multiple locations.
2. Technology Challenges
Trustworthy data-sharing networks are not always available, and usually, simple email server permissions end up controlling the data being shared via either emails or shared discs. This means a lot of time spend in downloading documents for review and editing, which can delay the project's timeline. Also, cybersecurity concerns will compound and amplify in a distributed work model.
3. Procedural Flaws in Handling Documents
When team members worked under one roof, there was no pressing reason to standardize the flow of documents from one person to another. However, with the advent of distributed working, standardizing long-standing processes and workflows became desirable and necessary.
4. Lack of Accountability & Responsibility
How is the quality of work ensured, and how are KPIs monitored in a distributed working environment? How productive and accountable is a team whose members work in isolation? Such questions deepen in distributed working environments where snowball effects are inevitable. A tiny delay at one procedural stage can quickly impact the entire deliverables-management value chain, which, if not monitored and linked with the schedule, can impact ALL the project deliverables.
Organizations must address these challenges if they are to continue to leverage the cost benefits of reduced overheads without impacting productivity. How? The answer lies in digital technology.
Organizations can use a common data environment (built on cloud platforms with built-in workflows based on the document type and contract requirements) to schedule the creation, review, and approval of documents and to drive work from one stage to the next, even as progress gets tracked and recorded by the system (including the time taken by everyone in the workflow to complete tasks.). This way, individual KPIs are tracked and published (as reports and dashboards) without sharing files via email or SharePoint.
A well-planned common data environment means that documents are sent only to the correct people, i.e., better security, which means that anybody with the proper authorization can access the information he needs from anywhere, i.e., higher efficiency.
Organizations worldwide embrace digital technology and have moved from using human supervisors to monitor productivity and quality to a system that gets the same or better results by mandating compliance with schedules. It’s a model of working that’s here to stay, and the impact of replacing manually-managed systems with digitalized systems has shown the industry the way forward when it comes to maintaining quality, fulfilling schedules, and taking advantage of new growth opportunities.