Making mistakes is a normal part of life. Equally, mistakes are a normal part of business. Mistakes, however, shouldn’t be perceived as somehow a failure or a sign of incompetence – they should instead be met as an opportunity to learn and grow; to strengthen your team and tighten your processes.  Clearly what I’m saying isn’t any new wisdom, as mistakes are as old as dirt and great thinkers over the millennia have been preaching about how to spin them to the positive.  Dozens of old expressions like “Fail-fast-forward”, “Corrective Action”, and “Lessons Learned”, point to a common theme about the constructive management of when things go wrong. 

A key corporate value that separates a well-run business from a not-so-well-run business is in how they handle mistakes, errors and failures.  An important business mantra to live by is that, “They’re only mistakes if you keep making them”.  Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is not just a sign of insanity, but a sign of a business improvement opportunity. For example, a company that is consistently under-performing on their projects, or not achieving profitability targets on their projects – and does little to correct that but hope for better results next time – is obviously not learning from their mistakes.  Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.  What is a strategy, is to examine and rethink processes and systems and apply corrective action towards eliminating chronic mistakes.  

Most contractors today exist in a very competitive landscape where margins are tight, and customers are demanding.  This leaves them little room for error when executing on projects – otherwise their profits will quickly be eroded, their reputation damaged, and their ability to sustain a healthy, growing company will be severely compromised.

There is a growing movement in the construction industry to adopt LEAN principles to streamline jobsite labor productivity.  As one of the primary costs of construction, labor alone constitutes as much as 30% of overall project cost, and represents the cost that is most subject to uncertainty and risk.  This risk is predominantly due to compromised site productivity on projects where there’s a high degree of wasteful, non productive labor time. 

In fact, it’s common to view labor productivity as the sole determining factor of overall project performance and profitability – i.e. project success or failure is directly dependant on labor productivity.  Other primary project costs – such as procurement, equipment, materials and engineering – can have associated risk and uncertainty but are marginal in comparison to risk associated to labor productivity.

Statistics show that more and more Oil and Gas contractors are moving forward and embracing better technology to streamline their businesses.  Contractors in many industries have been a bit late to adopt software as a means to improve their profitability - but that is changing fast.  This is partly due to the near-collapse in oil prices that haunted the industry over the past five years; which has recently been creeping up into the $60/bbl range to make things profitable again. During that period, companies had been searching for ways to remain profitable, and many turned to technology such as project cost management solutions to secure that profitability.  This momentum is continuing, as companies aren’t prepared to take a risk on another fall in prices.

If you were to ask any CFO or Controller which department should be responsible for all Procurement for the company, they would naturally respond with the Finance Department. On the other hand, if you were to ask any project controls professional about procurement, they would naturally respond with the Project Team, they should own procurement. 

So, who’s right?

There is a very heated and divisive debate going on in many areas of North America about pipelines.  More specifically, a debate about whether or not to build new pipelines to move Oil and Gas from where it’s extracted, to one of the several refineries available across the continent.  It’s an ideological clash that is steeped in near-religious conviction, misinformation, economic consequences and two sides that have dug in their heels; neither of which is prepared to budge.

Pipeline proponents will argue that pipelines are the safest, cheapest and most reliable way to move oil and gas. They provide jobs, wealth and access to markets for a valuable commodity.  Opponents however, claim that we need to reduce our carbon footprint, so pipelines represent further destruction of our fragile environment.  Both sides, of course, have valid points, wherein lies the dispute.

In this article I’m going to go through the basics of how, after creating a change order in 4castplus, you can go on to make any revisions to purchase orders based on the details of that change order. First, however, I’ll clarify a bit of terminology in terms of the difference between a change order and PO revision:

For any organization, their corporate data is one of the most important assets they possess. The information they gather on a daily basis forms the core of who they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going. The monumental technology changes going on in the world today have made ‘Data’ the central element that determines success or failure for most any company.

On any day of any major construction project, a ton of information is being collected about that project. Including: costs, hours, activities and progress; along with a variety of documents, photos, invoices and receipts.  Feeding all this data to the project managers is critical to enable them to bring the project to a successful completion on time and on budget.

The thing is, all this data that’s collected needs to be both accurate and complete, otherwise it’s not much use to anyone. Not only that, but it also has to be timely – meaning that, giving project managers data that several weeks old doesn’t really help much. It needs to be current, like from today, otherwise you’re managing the past, which is not only ineffective, but frustrating.