(54c) Holistic Planning Is Key for Good Safety in Projects and Construction Industry

In today’s rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive global economy, construction companies are under tremendous pressure to function at the peak of performance, and do so cost-effectively. Many companies adopt cost reduction measures which often tend to provide short-term benefits, but over the long term, have a negative impact. "Schedule" is used as shield by every player during project management to hide all sins.

Owners while building new facilities put tremendous pressure on EPC companies to complete projects in record time. Delays in projects are not acceptable. In the process of meeting timelines many strategic and tactical errors are committed by various players. Errors by one player can have cascading effect on rest of the project and schedule. Such errors adversely impact profit margins of EPC companies, commissioning time lines of production facilities and profitability for owners.

In the changing environment EPC (LSTK/ EPCC, EPCM) companies are struggling. Challenges are many, like price pressure, schedule pressure, quality of resource, retention of technical talent, hiring of smart contractors. In order to be relevant in the changing environment they have to evolve. But most of them are trying to face challenges by doing few superficial things.

Leaderships often do not have realization that they themselves need to evolve to address challenges of changing environment. They need to pull the rest of the organization with focus on mindset and behavior. Secondly for evolving organization, strategies and processes need to be regularly updated and should be relevant. Irrelevant processes and slow response of organization impact moral of employees.

In this situation they must work on couple of fronts. They should facilitate evolution of best project management practices. Second mindset and behaviors. Leadership themselves need to take balcony view so they can adjust themselves and pull rest of the organization to the next level of word class performance

This paper highlights the challenges that were faced by EPC (construction) companies, short-term gains achieved through simple changes, long-term gains made through holistic planning and benefits realized in the process.