Project Cost Management for the Oil & Gas Industry

Oil & Gas Estimating

Accurately Estimate Cost, Resources, Time, and Earned Value

Meeting multiple industry challenges including predictability, mandatory completion dates, and maintaining ongoing skilled labor creates added demands. Successfully delivering a complex project requires a new level of interoperability for contractors and owners, facilitated by HD Oil & Gas software.

Variation Controls

The value of estimating a project with the granularity and control that HD offers can only exist with a watertight variation control system. HD's complete audit trail incorporates fail-safe variation control. The scope of work cannot change without logging the variation and that variation's commercial status.

Schedule/Cost integration

The Oil & Gas industry's early adoption of computerized project controls has led many down a path that cannot properly integrate cost and schedule. Hard Dollar’s dynamic schedule/cost integration enables a generational break from legacy systems which inhibit the integration of data and create a single environment that controls cost, time and resource.

Centralize Multiple Estimating Systems

Over time, Oil & Gas organizations are likely to have a host of estimating “systems” – including disparate spreadsheets. These external spreadsheets can be incorporated inside HD, and converted to native HD norm based estimating if required. One estimating database as a result with any number of “systems” inside of it – central control over unique environments.

True Costs

Project management systems such as Primavera® and Microsoft® Project fall a step short to properly account for payroll burdens, overtime and difficulty factors. HD relieves the PM system from these tasks.

While scheduling applications like Microsoft® Project and Primavera® do a good job of helping planners understand when resources will be used on projects, they typically do not provide the depth of structure to help account for complex costing like payroll burdens, overtime and difficulty factors. Hard Dollar relieves the scheduling systems of having to provide this level of detail, in that these are native capabilities within its estimating program. For instance, base wages and labor burdens like fringes, insurance and taxes can be setup for individual resources; a completely different approach to burdens may be used on overtime and double-time rate structures. Combined with the ability to account for differences in work and pay hours (i.e., to pay someone for a ten-hour day while basing productivity off an eight-hour day), and the ability to adjust hours to match difficulty and weather factors (e.g., this work will be 20% more difficult than normal), Hard Dollar provides users with an accurate assessment of what costs will be while providing the audit-ability and transparency required by the industry’s most demanding customers.

Total Earned Value and Productivity Insight and Reporting

Hard Dollar provides a complete view of earned value and productivity, taking the functions of scheduling applications like Primavara® and Microsoft® Project to added comprehensive reporting of all aspects of earned value for complete job visibility. For example, Primavera® P6 reports productivity on the activity, without presenting the values for each resource. Adding the details of the resource level completes the loop allowing earned value reporting performed by a complex team of people and equipment.

Time Recording

Capturing expended and achieved time in a crew or individual basis with any data capture device is just one of the attributes of a time recording system that is exactly what any project controls team needs. HD easily incorporates existing time control systems.

HD's modular design means you might chose to utilize only the functions you do not already have. With a time recording system in place by most organizations, HD provides the additional much needed functionality.

Cost and Value

Both owners and contractors execute projects to make money, not just spend it. HD is designed to understand cost and value. Every resource in HD has a cost and a value, and the value can have a different time basis than the cost. Project management systems like Primavera® P6 and MIcrosoft® Project are good at cost or value. HD maps far more, including cost and value, including all business processes, and adding breadth to the single dimension of schedule.

Addressing Key Project Management Issues

Integration to legacy systems
New facility productivity and cost estimating
Reverse schedule planning
Managing cash flow within and across projects
Escalation of increasing and declining costs over long term projects
Project control at the refinery and location level
KBase and historical input utilized to develop detail and conceptual estimates
Resource utilization and specialty resource visibility

Advanced Reporting

Advanced web reporting and analytics provide unprecedented access to information from anywhere in world for both contractors and owners across multiple projects, categories, geographies, crews and other variables.

Financial System Interoperability

Standard integration with over 35 ERP systems eliminates duplicate data entry and tracking while maintaining integrity between operations and financial management. Detailed labor and productivity tracking of crafts and materials provide operations with the flexibility and capabilities required to meet advanced earned value reporting, resource utilization and planned activity predictability.

Scheduling Communication

Leverage the industry’s most advanced bi-directional, real-time integration with scheduling systems from Primavera® and Microsoft® Project to provide the ultimate flexibility to plan and meet Owner mandated cash schedules. Detailed historical crew and labor production databases make planning work and resources to fit within scheduled plant down times a simple process.

5D-BIM Server Power

Extensive Building Information Model (BIM) integration streamlines data management and handling from the CAD design process to ERP systems providing unprecedented labor savings, faster estimating turnarounds and easy to use flexible reporting. Producing conceptual to detailed productivity based estimates, bidding and tender processing, generating integrated cost and resource loaded schedules, automated timesheet collection, crew productivity, and tracking are maintained in one integrated system.