Project management in an engineering company

In most cases, industrial companies have the facilities they need to manufacture the products that make use of their know-how. Whether building a new workshop, setting up a plant abroad to get closer to markets, expanding an existing plant or diversifying, the project owner is faced with the following dilemma:

• do it yourself, i.e. become its prime contractor, putting to work for many months the resources that it does not have at its disposal in their entirety most of the time, embarking on an adventure that will require the mobilization of considerable resources that it may not have the opportunity to reuse once the installation is up and running;

• rely on an engineering company whose job it is to know how to manage different trades, buy, supply, manage subcontractors and worksites, and start up or help to start up.

In the first case, the client can and should call on the services of people who have been involved in the development of the product, or who are familiar with the techniques involved. In the latter case, he will place his "fate" in the hands of an engineering company, in principle in its entirety in the case of a turnkey contract. In this case, the prime contractor is obliged to guarantee a result, at the risk of heavy penalties.

It is the vocation of engineering companies to provide their customers with :

• know-how in their field of activity, be it refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, cement plants, plastics processing plants, etc. ;

• proven project management working methods. Remember that a project generally refers to the execution of a single object (refinery, fertilizer plant, etc.);

• human resources in some twenty different trades, including process engineers, project engineers, specialists in civil engineering, instrumentation, electricity, piping, etc.

Working methods, which for the most part originated in the United States, whether in the implementation of planning tools (task scheduling) or cost control, are increasingly using IT to solve both technical and management problems.

It's important that the customer understands how an engineering company works.

The basic engineering document contains knowledge in the form of schematic diagrams, process descriptions and simplified specifications for the main equipment.

It's the engineering company's job to move from this document to a plant that operates safely, with guaranteed performance, in minimum time and at minimum cost.

Understanding what's going on "behind...