Digitization & Intelligent Capture for Engineering & Construction Project Files

Energy, engineering and construction companies process large amounts of project-related information. Access to accurate information at the right time and the right place is mission-critical for stakeholders from engineering, finance, and project management teams. An important objective of every engineering or construction project is the handover of the as-built information to the owner/operator. Therefore, project teams need a high degree of control over the engineering and asset information. Without such control, there will be significant risks to the project schedule and costs and also the risk of non-compliance to regulatory guidelines.

Challenges in managing project files and handover documentation

Let's look at some common challenges that project teams face in managing project handover data and documents.

Data and document handover easily accounts for 1-2% of total CAPEX costs. The risk of cost overruns is high. Project teams must safeguard themselves from incorrect, incomplete or unsecured asset data. 

1. Is your project paper-dependent? 
   Paper is often a stumbling block to managing information efficiently. Physical documents run the risk of being damaged, lost, intentionally or erroneously destroyed, putting the project at serious risk. When project teams are distributed in different locations, transferring critical documents from one place to another is either too time-consuming, too expensive, or both. A digitized project handover ensures high levels of data accuracy and consistency, reduces project costs, and compresses project timelines. 

2. Is your asset information insufficient or inaccurate? 
   The quality of information is critical for ensuring project handover success. If you do not have access to consistent, accurate data or certain information is missed out or lost, it compromises successful project execution. Poor information also causes delays, increases costs, and negatively affects time-to-revenue, and may even expose the contractor to contractual fines, EHS penalties or even legal damages.

3. Is your project data interoperable? 
   Often, information resides in separate siloes, and integration between existing legacy systems and asset management solutions such as SAP, or Oracle, is challenging. If operational teams cannot access the latest project information consistently across various systems, it may lead to errors and delays. 

What you need is a single source of truth for all project and operations engineering information—a solution that supports handover at the end of the project or progressively through the project duration.

The solution for efficient project data handover and asset information management

Project handover documents include project datasheets, engineering layouts, technical drawings, clearance certificates, and more—these exist in either paper format or native file formats like .PDF, .XLS, .TIFF, .DWG or .PNG, among others.  

Enterprise content management systems provide a single, authoritative repository for storing and controlling these project-related documents. 

OpenText’s Application Content Management (ACM) solution serves as a repository for project documentation. It helps engineering and construction contractors and owner-operator stakeholders to mitigate risks across the project lifecycle and accelerate time-to-production. 

Digitizing engineering and project files―the first step

The first step is to digitize all project documents, which are in paper format. The OpenText Intelligent Capture platform scans, indexes and extracts data from high volumes of paper. It also extracts data from scanned images typically found in offices or digital mailrooms.

OpenText's Intelligent Capture Web Client provides a flexible, end-to-end capture process solution. It has advanced data extraction features using optical character recognition technology (OCR). It extracts data from scanned images, classifies the digital files, and routes them to software systems like the ERP or other back-end systems. Using OpenText Intelligent Capture, owner-operators, contractors or project teams in engineering companies can digitize their project data and enable quick and easy access to critical asset information.

OpenText's Intelligent Capture Web Client solution works with networked scanners in geographically disparate locations. It can interface with a large number of scanners and also capture documents from emails, network folders and other sources, making it ideal for project teams that work with external collaborators, vendors and partners. 

The importance of workflow management and versioning

Engineering workflow management is vital for successful project handovers. It is especially critical for projects requiring collaboration between team members at many different locations or across various stakeholders, vendors and partners. Project managers need to define specific workflows for their projects and then control the execution of those workflows across the team. 

This brings us to another critical concept in project data management—file versioning. With various stakeholders in a project, there are several change orders and variations of documents, latest document reviews and approvals, all types of project correspondence, notes on field inspections, and operations and maintenance data.

With multiple revisions, you need some way of controlling versions of these documents. If any team member or stakeholder refers to or works on an older version of a file, it increases the risk of errors in the final data handover and wastes time in rework. Therefore, you need a robust solution with version control features capable of restoring old versions if someone changes or deletes a document by mistake. 

Talk to RDS to implement and manage project data handover processes using advanced and integrated solutions for document scanning, intelligent capture and data extraction. Our consultants help you to understand how to reduce the costs of project data handovers. Our focus on workflow management and version control ensures that project data is managed meticulously and the correct information is available to the right people at the right time!