Project Management Information Systems (PMIS)
Case Study: PMIS for a large FIDIC and Cost-Plus EPC Contract, South Africa
Lephalale, South Africa
Case Study: PMIS for a large FIDIC and Cost-Plus EPC Contract, South Africa
Lephalale, South Africa
The Medupi Power Station is a coal fired high pressure boiler system designed to produce 4788MW of total power or 798MW from each of its six boiler units. Source water for the boilers will be piped from a raw water reservoir. The EPC contract is responsible for a design built large FIDIC contract with Eskom at Medupi Power is stations. Project delayed by the customer for more than 7 years with extension of time (EOT) paid on a cost-plus basis and multiple claims to be managed simultaneously. Read full case study.
Challenge
The project management team was faced with the challenge of dealing with thousands of letters and emails, all related to specific FIDIC contract subclauses and specific topics/issue. Other challenge was to substantiate every hour and component and deal with day to day changing site instructions to subcontractors and internal teams. Read the full case study.
Project Management Information Systems (PMIS)
A PMIS using a SharePoint platform has been implemented to simplify project management, increase collaboration and productivity. PMIS only used native SharePoint functionality without programming. It mainly included:
Training of a local SharePoint administrator and power user to also become the local trainer.
Structured document and email libraries seamlessly connected to Outlook for dragging and dropping email and attachments into SharePoint and capturing associated metadata along the way.
Communications, letters and notifications dashboard with workflows to generate reminders, lists and maintain interactions between incoming / outgoing documents, problem log, claims.
Centralized SharePoint lists being a single source of data to feed time booking, billing and work orders, thereby avoiding manual data processing and potential discrepancies.
Project specific timesheets to book time for change orders, work orders without overloading the ERP.
Automated reports using Excel functionality to connect various SharePoint lists without programming. Excel being the simplest reporting tool for everyone.
Search dashboard to record previous searches or those of teammates with comments to avoid duplication of work.
Download of all historical files to take advantage of the power of SharePoint search crawlers for all substantiation.
In this specific case, the implementation of PMIS has made it possible to justify granular work / claims and stay on top of contractual communication. The project management team was able to recover millions of dollars in lost billing opportunities.