In which I can’t stop bitching about our EPC…
Maybe because I’ve always been on the owner’s side of the
equation, I have an owner’s outlook on how a consulting engineer (or in this
case an EPC) should perform. It goes
something like this:
Dude, I’m paying you to make my life easier. If I had the time I would do it myself. I can forgive the odd mistake or two because
I am not perfect. I’m not infinitely
patient, though. I’ll give you plenty of
feedback along the way. If your
calculations show I need four bolts to hold something together, I want four
bolts; not five, not six, not eight; four.
If I tell you I want the design done on Thursday, I don’t want it
delivered on the following Wednesday, but if I’m being unreasonable I want to
know about it. Don’t blow me off. If a vendor screws you over, tell me and then
figure out what it will mean down the road.
I want all the documentation the vendor sends to you. If you send me a four-page memo when a
two-line email would suffice, understand that I will chew your butt because you
are charging me for your time and I understand billable hours. If you complain about me to my boss or anyone
else in my organization, don’t expect your invoices to be signed this
decade. Treat me with decency and you
will come back – if you piss me off keep your mouth shut when I call someone
else next time.
I’m trying very hard not to sound like a douchebag, but
lousy service ticks me off. Mediocre
service is fine. You don’t have to wine
and dine me. I don’t need your logo on a
coffee mug. I don’t mind paying my own
greens fees. Do your dam job and we’ll
be great.
You’d think I’d have used up all my pent-up bile on two long
posts earlier, but I was mostly pointing out that we caused our own problems by
being idiots. Our EPC took full
advantage of the fact that we were idiots, and that’s why this sh_t is still
stirring around in my brain. In my world
you don’t steal the hubcaps from the car broken down at the side of the road;
you help change the tire. Even then, you
sure as hell don’t leave a bunch of lug nuts loose and then smile behind your
hand when they drive off. In the last
six months I’ve found all kinds of things that a well-managed consulting
engineering firm would have done right, but ours, for whatever reason,
wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.
If you do only one thing right, just one, get your
documentation squared away. For process
industries, this means starting with process and instrumentation diagrams, or
P&IDs. Everything else flows from
these. There are standards for these;
use them.
In our case, we already had the PI&Ds fleshed out except
for the nomenclatures (e.g. equipment numbering), but inexplicably we allowed
the EPC to screw these up. These are
basic, and all it takes is the desire to do it right. We didn’t have that desire, but neither did
the EPC. One of the major vendors
provided all their drawings with the wrong numbering, and nobody bothered to
fix it. All it takes is someone with a
red pen to review and edit. It’s like
the old story about anybody, somebody and nobody. There’s no excuse. Now someone who gives a rip has to do it, and
that person is me. And I rage at my
former co-workers every time. The
bastids hung me out to dry.
I have no idea what documentation we requested because I
wasn’t with the company at the time, but it only makes sense that we asked to
receive all the vendor docs. They were
spotty for the first part of the plant and my predecessor screwed that all to
hell, but he was a kid fresh out of school and the only reason he had the job
was because his college roommate was the son of one of our VPs. He definitely did not have OCD.
Obviously the EPC whiffed on the rest of the vendor
docs. I eventually found most of them in
some boxes and bookshelves in the trailer they abandoned. That there is some great customer service,
yessiree Bob.
A wily project manager (well, actually, me) will tell you
that a good start-up can help people forget all the sins that occurred during
the project, and if you were our EPC you would have put in a good effort to
make sure you leave the customer with a whiff of Chanel No.5. Alas, the full litter box they left would not
have made Coco very proud. Not one interface (PLC to DCS and vice-versa)
worked correctly. An o-fer. They said they checked motor rotations, and
odds are they got half of them right without even trying (and they did!)(Please
save your clapping until the end). Once
we got the interfaces squared up, we had to check all the instrumentation,
since you don’t want a control valve opening when it should be closing. We found some of these were bad months after
start-up; the operators had been overriding the program because there was no
other way to make it work.
The fact that we did make it work is a reflection on the
operators and process engineers, who cleaned out the Augean Stables, literally
and figuratively.
The CEO remained a supporter of the EPC until a
“supplemental” invoice showed up. They
won’t be back.
Comments
Post a Comment