Industries

Tired of capital project delays and cost overruns? Try systems-driven design.

By Justin Tuttle

The energy, chemicals and infrastructure industries are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation opportunity: $130 trillion of capital project investments are expected by 2027 to decarbonize and renew critical infrastructure. At the same time, these industries face a deepening challenge: cost overruns and project delays. In fact, average capital project cost overruns approach a staggering $1.2 billion, while project delays can extend from six months to two years.

How can your business take concrete steps to reduce capital project costs and delays while remaining compliant with fast-changing customer and regulatory requirements? It begins with adopting a systems-driven design approach for large capital assets.

Read on to discover how systems-driven design can help your businesses design innovative capital assets with clearly defined requirements that are more likely to work the first time and with minimal rework.

Use a requirements management solution to improve decision-making and collaboration 

While many events can delay capital projects, the root cause is often businesses’ complex and fragmented engineering design approach. With multiple design teams working with different tools and applications, it becomes difficult to maintain seamless communication. Your organization can overcome these challenges by adopting a requirements management solution that integrates requirements across all engineering domains, disciplines and processes.

With a requirements management platform in place, a mechanical engineer can make a design change to a gas turbine model, and that change is reflected in real-time across all design representations. Each stakeholder continuously has access to the latest data to make better-informed, collaborative decisions.

Embrace model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to ensure contractual and regulatory compliance 

Use model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to build in the customer voice regulatory framework to continuously verify compliance with requirements throughout your asset lifecycle. With a systems-driven design approach, you can build a comprehensive blueprint of your entire system lifecycle management architecture to start integrated and stay integrated.

Classify and reuse entire sub-systems, including requirements, history and change, for future projects and programs of work. Evaluate capital asset effectiveness while driving closed-loop collaboration with end-to-end traceability. In other words, a continuous feedback method where responses from different teams are captured into one system for faster and more streamlined design processes.

Leading companies are managing requirements throughout the product development process

Vaillant Group is a global heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning technology leader. The company needed a consistent process to specify requirements throughout the product development process, reduce data silos, connect teams and continuously improve products.

Read the Vaillant Group case study to discover how they:

  • Created a central collaboration platform for requirements management
  • Increased transparency with ALM-PLM integration
  • Provided all stakeholders access to the same information source
  • Accelerated digital transformation capabilities

It’s now possible to deliver capital projects on time and under budget 

With tremendous investments and opportunities in capital projects, companies are under growing pressure to eliminate the delays and cost overruns of the past. Using a systems-driven design process, it’s now possible to ensure continuous contractual and regulatory compliance.

Whether your business wants to improve your power plant design processes or decarbonize a refinery, the time is now to pivot and adapt quickly to new ways of engineering and design. Discover more about systems-driven design by watching our video.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/energy-utilities/2024/06/26/tired-of-capital-project-delays-and-cost-overruns-try-systems-driven-design/