Bentley ProjectWise Construction Work Package Server available

In a virtual press conference recently, Harry Vitelli, Bentley vice president, construction and field and Mark Hattersley, Bentley product manager spoke about the immediate availability of ProjectWise Construction Work Package Server.

“This product is the only commercially available off-the-shelf offering that allows constructors to implement the emerging best practice of work packaging,” said Vitelli. “This new paradigm in construction is being advocated by leading industry organizations, including the Construction Industry Institute, following research showing that such methodologies can increase safety and lower total install cost.”

Of the $420 million labor hours that should be done efficiently, only $155 million of that is work getting done.

“When we went after this broad problem and we obviously wanted to look around and look for industry best practices and standards that we could incorporate in our software,” said Vitelli. “After working with the Construction Industry Institute for the past five years on a research initiative on a Project #272 published this past July. There is a whole process associated with work packaging that enables EPCMs and owners to work together from the front end planning process all the way down through commissioning and startup.”

Bentley built this into their software, enabling work packaging to get set up at the loading stage where you have engineering work packages tied to construction work package which gets tied down to an installation work package which is where the crew productivity comes in.  “This industry standard is the way we believe these large industrial mega projects are going to be executed going into the future,” said Vitelli. “The research wasn’t just a couple of pages in a PDF, it was extensive, it was based on numerous case studies that were done on with like companies doing like projects some using this process of work packaging, some not. There is an implementation guide going through what best practices, job description, workflows and technology needed, and the whole volume associated with the recommended business process between the EPC and owner.”

The project management process is about breaking down projects into well-defined management components. These components then service your information between different phases of a project, be it engineering, procurement, construction, operations. Every project will be doing it differently, according to Hattersley.

An example is an engineering company with deliverables, specifications, procurement management materials, construction balancing controls which include estimates and schedules, document control section – all the way down to the construction management system that is being used to managed the infrastructure at the operating facility.

Definitions:

(CWA) Construction Work Areas – These break down a set of work areas into a set of spatially located areas for work to be conducted, that helps contractors where they want to start and proceed.

(CWP) Construction Work Package is the most critical document in the whole sequence – it can be thought of as almost as bid package. It’s a breakdown by discipline and activity of the overall construction scope. Different organizations have different implementation paradigms. Supplemented by

(EWPs) Engineering Work Packages are the actual procurement package – the drawings, models, metrics, specifications, etc. The important thing is the EWP development has to be aligned with the CWP development. “We don’t want engineering running on its schedule and having construction having absolutely no insight into what that is, and vice versa, we want to allow the contractors and engineers to plan together, still go and do their own work, so everything is aligned the right way,” said Hattersley.

(IWP) Installation Work Package.  This actually is a deliverable that conducts all the information that a crew needs to do to a shift of work, and every project defines a shift differently. The idea is this document has to have all the information for this crew including all their tools, resources, everything they need to go to work. That’s going to help that 37% efficiency significantly.

“In big projects, there is a massive amount of data now, too many moving parts to the whole story,” said Hatterseley. “There are different systems purpose built, and we want to make sure ProjectWise Instruction Work Package Server didn’t compete with these so we’re not trying to fight with the Material Management System or Project Control System. All these systems are siloed so we wanted to find a way to integrate across those systems, so we can provide data from them.”

Both contractor and builder need to know what is happening and need an automated system to be in place and get feedback from the field. Work package rollups are the important invisibility into that process.

Tags: AEC, Bentley Systems, construction, engineering, EPCM, infrastructure

Categories: AEC, Bentley Systems, BIM, building information modeling, engineering, field solutions, infrastructure

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