Business

Infrastructure mega-projects, preferably for water treatment and desalination, with prices above US$ 100 million.

Problem

Out of nearly 40 companies qualified for mega-projects today, only 3 - 5 may prepare bids within 6 months. What is prepared focuses on the final destination - the plant. The journey - how bespoke mega-project execution will meet the customer requirements on quality, risks, and the time frame – is never explained. These challenges hide even the bigger one – how to operate and maintain the plant.

Bidders don't know how to do this within the limited budget, time, and resources on the one hand, and modern project engineering and management (PEM) paradigms originated from expensive and high-revenue Oil & Gas projects on the other hand. The latter disregards the water industry constraints.

Due to the low quality of the project management and zero execution transparency over 70% of mega-projects are completed above the budget or/and schedule. Scarce human resources and low productivity rates in engineering and construction make contractors incapable of handling more than 1 mega-project in 3-5 years.

Potential customers tend to delay decisions on desalination applications due to complexity, high cost, and long duration of tendering. When pressed for a decision, in about 50% of cases they opt for the "fast toll lane" of unsolicited projects. This tendency should be considered alarming for projects labeled by the World Bank as "an exception to the norm" due to a lack of transparency and competition, and the risk of corruption and protectionism.

The high cost of bidding and the risk of failure explain the widening gap between the supply and demand in the desalination market. Tenders' cancellations due to a lack of bidders became a norm.

Software

What makes mega-projects unique is a combination of disciplines and execution phases: engineering, detail design, procurement, construction, and maintenance. Any known software tool that may be potentially used in mega-project space is locked inside a specific discipline or phase. Adding a new tool means creating a new silo and exacerbating the problem of information interoperability. In most cases, these drawbacks question the tool's usefulness. (The exception is 3D software dominating in mechanical design and accounting for roughly 20% of the mega-project workload.)

The best illustration of non-holistic approach consequences is a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS). Over 80% of its numerous implementations fail. Ditto for commissioning and project scheduling software.

The overturned pyramid explains why this happens – each next phase up has a higher weight in the project-plant life cycle, but its success depends on the previous one.

Inadequacy of the available software tools makes companies stay with such general purpose programs like WORD, EXCEL, and AUTOCAD and away from digital transformation.

Solution

In contrast to 3D modeling of hardware, Crenger.com implements Business Process (BP) modeling of the human-machine interactions over the entire project-plant lifecycle. It is viewed as a no-silo space partitioned by neither disciplines nor project phases.

As a result, the unrestricted exchange of data between services modeling BP and the business automation lead to 10X speed in the project bidding, procurement, and execution and make the project management practices meet theory. FEED (front end engineering and design) takes about 50 hours instead of 8 – 16 months. Having the FEED package, any engineering company without previous desalination experience may execute the project of any size.

Fast and non-expensive bidding and a bigger number of bidders will make tendering redundant. Instead, a simple request for quotation (RFQ) will suffice. The online RFQ generator helps customers create the mega-project specification, collect bids, and select the best one.

Another dramatic outcome of BP modeling is the virtual consolidation of businesses serving desalination megaprojects - a way to better pricing and quality.

Technology commercialization

As Crenger.com technology mimics the business process of a typical engineering company engaged in desalination mega-projects it may seem natural to consider such a company as a customer and SAAS as a business model. Such reasoning is flawed.

The said companies are reluctant to discuss any innovation that does not reinforce current goals and strategies. They see Trojan Horse in any technology with black-box architecture "not invented here". Actual users of the technology - the company staff - do not welcome it either as it makes redundant many positions and the company hierarchy.

An ideal customer is a company specializing in P3 project development, investment, and general management focused on selecting expert teams. They may include water agencies, engineering, construction and design companies, and sources of capital. Such type of a customer has a much broader range of interests fully met by the technology in question. A merger will be a win-win opportunity setting the company above any competition.

As a foundational technology, Crenger.com may be easily adapted to other process industries - wastewater treatment, oil & gas, chemical, and pharma.

Future impact

Any emerging technology should be analyzed from 2 different perspectives. The first is near-term pragmatism. It tries to fit the new technology into the working space of the old ones it intends to replace and assess the differences. The second is the long-tailed technology-amplified discovery of new services and products. An example is the computer operating system (OS). It paves the way and hosts thousands of technologies that did not have a chance to emerge without OS.

Plants stock. The 10X speed of plant engineering and the design auto-scaling will urge companies and freelancers to create stocks of ready-for-execution plants. They may be re-used or re-shared. Design auto-validation removes any difference in the plant engineering details authored by a company or a freelancer.

Stocks will impact the feasibility studies as they always include the plant's preliminary design. Engineering consulting will lose the design guidance and standards compliance functions as stocked plants are already validated.

Plant control design. Its chronically poor implementation adds about 6 months to the project schedule and contributes to over 40% of all system failures. The problem is in the vast amount of data to be manually softwired into the SCADA program controlling the plant operation. Crenger.com auto-generates this program in Structured Text (over 100,000 lines of code) and the control architecture based on the plant designer's instructions written in normal language.

Procurement. It is the biggest component in the BP model and in business virtual consolidation driven by the principle: "quote once - use many times". The component features a standard communication channel, high speed and transparency of bidding, order tracking, and automated procedure for new bidders' prequalification. It will eventually lead to better pricing and quality of services and products without substantial loss of warranty observed today.

Networking. Crenger manages a hybrid business process - a sequence of tasks executed by humans or by software. Understanding the human task makes Crenger a perfect platform for advertising, upskilling, job hunting, and information sharing.

Artificial Intelligence. Mega-projects produce astronomic volumes of data on engineering, procurement, commissioning, operation, and maintenance. It may shared through API interface in exchange for an AI output.