Learn how to Increase Your Project Efficiency Using Cloud-Based Solutions

Use Cloud-Based Solutions to Increase Your Project Efficiency

Have you ever wondered how much time, resources and money are wasted due to inefficiencies in your commissioning process?

We have. This is why we created our Inspectivity Platform. Blue chip organisations across the oil and gas, mining, and engineering sectors are struggling with paper-based workflows, loss of information and duplicated efforts. There is a better way to manage your oil and gas inspection projects. And it starts with a strong foundation.

Over the coming weeks we will build on our Productivity Killers article by looking into the Inspection Project Pipeline and examining how you can use clever technology-based solutions to streamline your oil and gas inspection and commissioning projects, saving you time, resources and money.

Today we are going to share with you how the Inspectivity Platform can deliver better project efficiency, especially at project kick off, through paperless, collaborative and real-time project templates.

Spreadsheets

The spreadsheet is the ubiquitous fall back for tracking status because we all have Microsoft on our SOEs, the cost is minimal, and it’s as simple as ‘File > New’.

However, many people forget the long-term cost of using a non-enterprise solution for managing large scale projects. A lack of scalability, limited multi-user capability, and issues of data security are our main concerns with this approach. You need to ask yourself, how can we stop the information being lost or corrupted? And how can you track the history of the data (ie. spreadsheets have no audit capacity)? We believe Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool, but not for your inspection projects.

Technology

Just like anything we do, if you want to do it well you need solid foundations. In terms of business processes, quite often success is dependent on using the right technology. Using the Inspectivity Platform for inspection projects will help you avoid wasted effort and allow you to focus on performing the work instead of supporting the process.

Getting Started

Switching to our cloud-based templates is simple, fast and a worthwhile investment. Inspectivity Support can set up a new client and configure their customised platform within days. User training can run in parallel, and your project’s data setup can be prepared for import. Take for example a commissioning project. If you have a structured set of data that represents the divisions, systems, subsystems of your inspection scope, the platform’s functions allow you to import your project hierarchy quickly.

You can also automatically create draft inspection procedures for the items that form part of the verification project (eg. MC, EC, Pre-Commissioning etc.).

We understand that a simple import is not right for every client. If you are seeking a more integrated solution, we are integration experts and can help you achieve this type of implementation.

The figure below shows an example of where Inspectivity has been integrated with Autodesk’s Navisworks, allowing a client to relate an existing 3D model to inspection concepts within the Inspectivity Platform.

If you are planning a tighter integration why not ask us about running a pilot project. We can provide close support with your engineers to help you perform a detailed evaluation. This gives you the opportunity to see the practical business benefits of the Inspectivity Platform with minimal upfront commitment.

Procedure Templates

After your project scope is defined, you need to bring together the content needed to carry out your inspection work. These are your templated procedures and check sheets. Inspectivity supports the concept of templates; you document a procedure once and then share across all of your projects. This removes the rework productivity killer and ensures consistent quality.

Inspectivity’s inspection templates are a series of Sections and Checks.

Flexible input controls allow you to build up rich templates for your inspection procedures. This enables Inspectors to work through the procedure more efficiently with more organised results.

Procedure Reviews

The nature of commissioning projects typically means multiple stakeholder groups will need to collaborate to build up inspection procedures. You may have inspectors on-site in an Asian shipyard, vendor representatives in Europe, and project engineering teams in the USA. The geographical spread complicates the review process but all inputs are required to build up the procedures.

The Inspectivity Platform procedure review process helps distributed teams by facilitating a more collaborative approach, which reduces the cost of developing procedures. One direct benefit of our cloud-based solution is a reduction in the need for face-to-face meetings. Stakeholders can access the procedures via the cloud, perform a review, add comments, approve, reject, and more.

Everyone is working in a single environment, all conversations about a review are tracked and are retained for historical purposes. There is no need to resort to Track Changes in MS Word for documenting your comments or use disparate systems for communications (eg. email).

Conclusions

To achieve greater project efficiency, you need to set up solid foundations when you begin your project. Avoid system bottlenecks such as spreadsheets by using an enterprise solution.

Data set ups should not be a barrier. Inspectivity can be set up within a matter of days and your project hierarchy configured fast. More complicated data set ups are not a barrier when you have the support of our integration experts. Our pilot projects also allow you to make risk free software decisions.

Once you are setup you can build up a library of inspection procedure templates that can be shared across all of your projects. Write once and use everywhere. Saving time in this area may even help you reduce the size of your verification teams.

Now your templates are drafted, you can save money with a more collaborative review process. You can work faster on the review and have all the history in one place. Plus, less face-to-face meetings are an obvious cost saving.

The Inspectivity Platform can help you increase your project efficiency, especially at project kick off, and in other areas too. To learn more read our next post in this series Scheduling and Performing Inspection Work. In the meantime, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn for project efficiency advice and updates.

 

Increase your project efficiency using our unique cloud -based solution. Contact us to start your 30 day free trial today.