Interesting times we live in. In the water industry, we start talking less about what separates it from others and more about what unites it - the same volatile markets and supply chains, rising voices of communities and networks in decision-making on megaprojects fate, environmental awareness, and business sustainability. So today it is critical not to invent the wheel in solving encountered non-water challenges but to tap into the pool of ready-for-use technologies available on the market.
Desalination companies engaged in large-scale infrastructure projects never share their hard-earned and costly lessons on the pitfalls of project execution.
So the article by Lihy Teuerstein "Large-Scale Infrastructure Projects: Navigating The Challenges Of Change" published in Forbes immediately caught my attention.
She is the CEO of IDE Water Assets building against all odds the Sorek 2 desalination megaproject. It seems to be the main source of inspiration for this excellent article.
The author discusses new challenges never experienced in the water industry 5 - 10 years ago. Actually, these challenges are not new, their coming to the water industry was simply delayed. Today digitization has turned all these challenges into routine procedures.
What are these impossible-to-solve challenges that have sent the water industry into deep shock?
The author starts with "Build confidence within communities" by creating a communication channel with all the stakeholders.
In other industries, this task falls under the category of branding. It is driven by bi-directional communication where vision, knowledge, and experience sharing creates an illusion of business transparency and trustworthiness, and generates stable feedback from the network followers, which, in turn, kindles the business. Branding is all about creating a virtuous circle, in which communities (not technology!) define the business destination.
Crenger.com describes step-by-step procedures for how to re-wire the business mindset and start building such kind of branding.
The next problem is tagged by the author as "Acknowledge the local and regional regulations". On the face of it, nothing's interesting - internationalization and localization are old topics. Except for one detail. The problem's description that follows, indirectly tells us about the vicious circle of the project construction permits and approvals.
In a nutshell, for the local authorities to approve the project, its full technical details (FEED) shall be available for review. To develop FEED, companies normally allocate 6 - 12 months and a budget of $USA 1 - 5 Million. This costly and risky process is not worth starting unless a company is guaranteed to get all the permits and approvals. Otherwise, the odds are high that expenses will be never reimbursed. Take, for example, the Huntington Beach desalination plant's saga (USA).
This obstacle is unsurmountable without digital technologies like the PlantDesigner platform from crenger.com. It creates FEED packages from scratch in 50 hours. If a similar project exists in the catalog, it may be just scaled automatically in no time at all. Any localization is just a button click.
Such FEED packages may be navigated by the local authorities online, as well as discussed and approved. The digital twin of the plant operation and maintenance may be viewed online too. It blows my mind away!
The author's final advice is "Understand the market and diverse supply sources". Being too general and, hence, ambiguous, it hides remarkably complex phenomena, which the author tried and failed to articulate - whether it is the market volatility or the company match to the project complexity. All of them contribute to the project risks. How crenger.com eliminates them is discussed extensively by me in "Crengineering". The recipe is simple - full automation of the project scheduling and costing including the project price adjustment clause. It allowed crenger.com to achieve the impossible - to automate the procurement from bids' submission to the winner selection.