Whether due to market pressures, new safety protocols, sustainability targets, or skilled labor availability, many organizations are facing delayed capital projects. Others are simply worried about their projects still being able to deliver shareholder value once they come online in a volatile economic climate.
Though it may seem counter-intuitive, investing in a sophisticated Business Readiness (BR) program is one of the best ways to protect, improve, and create value for your project, no matter what stage you are at and yes, even if you’ve been delayed.
Why investing in BR is worth it at every stage of a project
Because the goal of BR focuses not just on getting a facility up and running, but on aligning the operation with an organization’s corporate goals for long-term profitability and sustainability, investing in BR is worth it at every stage of a project, even if you’re just steps away from bringing your new asset online.
Create and maximize value with early-stage investment
In the early stages of a project, BR outlines the key strategic drivers and organization targets to achieve success at operation stage while creating new value above and beyond your project’s best-case-scenario predictions. It’s possible to do this when BR is fully embedded into the earliest-stage discussions that take place in the prefeasibility and conceptual engineering phases.
The role of BR needs to be explicitly defined as part of a project’s overarching strategy and that definition should articulate how the BR strategy is aligned with the corporate vision. This allows owners to determine the path to follow for a sustainable operation according to their specific business strategy and assign the proper resources to execute it. BR demands a holistic approach that considers a broad range of project dimensions including operations strategy, organization enablement, functions, and systems management, framed on the corporate vision.
Even if you think it’s too early and the project has no defined structure or schedule, having a BR strategy will enhance the development of the project as it comes to life with the evolution of each project stage.
Early investment in BR can create value in many different ways:
- Enabling a solid operations organization
- Defining and implementing action plans to respond to issues and create synergies and opportunities
- Setting comprehensive KPIs with the business case and establishing reporting at all levels
- Integrating the requirements of all core and support areas
- Monitoring committed activities in real time to ensure they are clear, integrated, and carried out
- Eliminating silos and creating a common language
- Managing operational risks by identifying proactive opportunities for improvement
- Implementing comprehensive training and change management programs
- Aligning the different stakeholders on a common and tangible vision to achieve success at start up and operate
Not only does investing in BR this early unlock additional value in your project, it also minimizes the overall cost of conducting BR activities throughout.
Improve value with middle-stage investment
In the middle stages of a project, you still have time to use BR to improve and protect the massive capital cost investment you’ve made by optimizing some of your project’s most critical activities including the ramp-up program and load commissioning stage. Even in the middle stages, investing in BR can significantly reduce your ramp-up time and thus have a significant impact on your return on investment.
Protect value with late-stage investment
In the late stages of a project when you’re steps away from bringing an asset online, investing in BR still gives you a chance to support the achievement of your project’s planned value and minimize the risk for erosion of that value by having expert support in place to respond to and solve problems quickly. BR is still of critical importance at this point to protect shareholder value.
Remote BR is your best route to ramp-up and track your transition to operations
BR offers a way to proceed with important preparatory steps and that can be handled remotely. Critical activities can be executed with online cloud-based tools and remote support to ensure the safety of project teams without impacting the quality of the work being done.
These digital tools offer important advantages over more traditional approaches: easier collaboration, transparency, increased accountability, better traceability, more effective monitoring, and enhanced decision-making capability while enables communication and support leadership decisions. With centralized aggregation of data from across the project, more sophisticated analysis can help identify bottlenecks and issues that can become risks. This can be done faster and more effectively, before they become bigger and more expensive problems to fix.
No matter what stage you’re at, remote BR allows you to assess scenarios to optimize your program in order to continue to meet your main targets for sustainable operations and achieve a faster ramp-up once you’re given the green light.
The potential for sustained value creation far exceeds the cost of investment in BR
Organizations that invest in BR early on frequently recognize the inaccuracy of industry-standard estimates and benchmarks of the owner’s cost for this critical component of getting a successful project online. Sometimes the costs are higher than expected and sometimes they are lower, but a proper BR plan can give a more accurate estimate and demonstrate the extent to which early investment pays off in the long run.
Early investment and sustained engagement on BR activities throughout multi-billion-dollar projects in the Middle East and South America resulted in savings of months on planned ramp-up times. This represents a significant impact to the bottom line of any capital project and far surpassed the cost of their respective BR investments.
Even in late-stage projects, the application of BR expertise has bridged gaps and mitigated negative impacts to projects’ bottom lines.
Why we should constantly challenge our assumptions
Having an operations focus allows you to see what you need for your asset to start up and operate in a stable and sustainable way, fulfilling the commitments you have with your shareholders, your workers, the community, and the environment.
This approach requires a different perspective from that of the project itself. It expands the focus outward to incorporate the corporate vision and extends it to incorporate the life of the project many years into operation.
Because no two projects are alike and no two projects come online under identical operating conditions, to be competitive we must always be prepared to challenge the following assumptions when it comes to BR:
- Process validation for nameplate capacity, recovery, and availability
- People requirements and training solutions
- Technology and digitalization applications and potential
- Effective work processes, ways of working, flexibility, and productivity targets
There is no single solution for any given issue. Inviting in the perspectives of experts in the field can help us shift our own to find better solutions together.
