Life Cycle Materials Risk Mitigation (LMRM)

This project will develop a web enabled materials management checklist linked to project phases to ensure potential disruptions to the orderly flow of materials are identified and systematically addressed by the responsible parties as early as possible on a capital project. Fiatech has already identified over 300 attributes that can impact material flows and has allocated these attributes to various elements in the materials management enterprise. During the life cycle of a capital project, primary and secondary responsibilities for addressing these attributes shifts along with the work required to resolve potential disruptions. This web-enabled tool will provide an interactive environment to collect and monitor the activities directed at addressing potential material flow disruption sources by project phases.

In addition, this project will showcase a potential paradigm shift in how to effectively deal with ambiguous, complex, large scale, multi-attribute and time dependent information, which may have applicability in other areas such as: risk management (project execution, financial, workflows, material flows and information flows); failure analysis; lessons learning and gap analysis; experience sharing; and operations support. This technology has the potential to: raise situational awareness; streamline information sharing; provide for effective sense making; enhance predicting/anticipating performance; and facilitate more effective reasoning and decision making.

Benefits

A study conducted by Marsh (1985), showed that the construction industry invests only 0.15% of its costs in materials management and control, versus 1% for the manufacturing industry (Formoso and Revelo 1999). Construction Industry Institute (CII) studies have shown that materials and installed equipment can comprise 50-60% of a project’s total cost and control 80% of its schedule (Ibn-Homaid 2002). These studies make a compelling point that essentially any disruption or inefficiency in the orderly flow of materials has a high likelihood of directly and significantly impacting project performance. This project will provide an environment where potential oversights and vulnerabilities are addressed to the appropriate level, by the responsible parties, and at the right phase in the life cycle of a capital project.

Opportunities/Status

This project was launched in early 2012 and is in the formation phase. To ensure completeness and viability, stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) from any materials management enterprise area are invited to participate and/or cosponsor this project.

Fiatech Staff Project Manager

Reg Hunter, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Project Leads

Susan Bennett, Cross Innovations/Saffron
Michael Buss, Intergraph

Additional SMEs needed to identify and develop optimal approach to this project including: refining success criteria and setting expectations; developing requirements, delineating tasks, refining deliverables; allocating and managing action items; setting and maintaining schedule; refining checklists, organizing checklists to capital project life cycle phases and defining responsible parties with actions required; supporting development of proof of concept evaluations; information dashboards; developing user interface framework; performing valuation analysis; and sharing results.

Participating Companies

Bechtel, Fluor, HAL, Panprojects

Deliverables

Refinements to the checklist and materials management enterprise allocations
Mapping responsibilities for checklist items by project phase
Trades associated streamlining data collection methods
Trades associated with analytics and visualization approach
First article demonstration and review
User beta testing
Final tool release
Lessons learned report
Presentations at Fiatech member meeting, conferences and webinars

Completion Date

Spring 2013