Strategy & Planning
Understanding global trends and economic environment
Creating an early understanding of global trends such as deregulation of markets, change in governmental and economic policies are essential to set up a holistic strategy for complex capital projects.
Dynamic project life cycle requires agile strategy
The interaction of several factors, in particular, disruptive technologies, shorter project life cycle phases and increasing competition result in the need to set up an agile strategy with iterative readjustments.
Market and stakeholder needs
Understanding the market and stakeholder requirements validates that the feasibility of the project is understood and later efforts are not in vain. Early identification of areas of focus will also validate that resources are targeted on critical areas and ultimately, that the project is delivered successfully.
Our Approach
PwC/s strategy and planning method combines experience from numerous capital projects and industry best practices on the one hand, while it is also adjustable to the specific industry and country requirements and preferred level of detail, on the other. Our methods will assist in analyzing project economics and prevalent policies as well as underlying regulations. Furthermore we support in conducting profound feasibility studies along with scenario and option analysis.
Complementary services:
- Strategic advice on areas of opportunity
- Revenue and demand forecasting
- Market assessment
- Cost - Benefit analysis
- Targeted feasibility and sustainability assessments of individual projects and markets
- Benchmarking / market testing
- Project life cycle adaption
- Strategic advice through investment planning process
Added Value
Benefits of using PwC/s Capital Project Strategy & Planning Method include the following:
- Holistic and profound understanding of opportunities, challenges, constraints, and other key considerations to develop a set of different investment alternatives
- Reflecting the existing commercial, legal, regulatory structures, key competitors, and crucial constraints to plan on a solid basis and ensure successful delivery of capital project
- Strategy toolbox, which enables the client to adapt their strategy iteratively in predefined re-assessment and -adjustment cycles
- Sustainable growth at minimum risk as key market and stakeholder needs are reflected accordingly
Strategic Project Management Office (PMO) Services
Lack of PM capabilities
Organisations undertaking capital projects do often suffer from a lack of in-house staff with deep contracting and project delivery experience. Finding the right experts with the capability to identify major project risks, and assess compliance with contract terms and project delivery processes are major challenges.
Common mistakes in early project phases
During project acquisition phase critical execution concept questions such as selecting one general contractor vs. several subcontractors or finding the right type of contract agreement most suitable to your investment project are often disregarded.
Establish proactive Management
During execution phase a reactive administration of construction sites instead of foresighted proactive management is one of the major challenges. 75% of all capital projects fail with regard to their determined quality, time, or cost targets.
Our Approach
PwC can assist your organisation during setup and operation of a comprehensive Project Management / Owner Support Office focusing on capital project performance improvement and risk reduction.
Set up Project Management / Owner Support Office. During setup we define the PMO/OSO structure and develop all required processes in coordination with the client’s capacities and capabilities. We generally pursue an integrated approach by integrating client’s staff into the PMIO/OSO organisation for a powerful project management team. Roles and responsibilities within the OSO as well as project-specific, project management and value chain processes will be clearly defined. The OSO may support all phases along the entire value chain of a project in various areas such as execution concept, contractor selection and execution management. All tasks focus on securing your investment case while working in an integrated team.
Added Value
Benefits of using PwC’s strategic PMO approach include the following:
- Proactive and foresighted project management approach
- Strong track record, global experience and local know-how as well as best practices will be shared with the integrated project management team
- Early and optimized project execution concept to secure your investment case
- Improved contractor selection adhering to project specific contract terms
- Constant project transparency with regard to cost, time and quality by an automated and forward looking reporting
- Early mitigation of risks and consequent change and claim management
- High performing teams with clear accountability and defined interdependencies
Project Excellence
Disruptively changing business environment
Digitalization is currently the hottest mega trend within the industries. Companies are in the area of conflicts between the necessity to act shortly in a disruptively changing business environment and the uncertainty how-to respond to the digitalization needs correctly.
Technical complexity & shorter project durations
In particular Contractors from Central Europe needs to defend their technological leadership, hence this is complicated by rising technical complexify & shorter project durations linked to a higher risk profile that needs to be covered by the project/program
Enormous margin pressure
Rising competition in particular from Far East leads to increasing competition and high pressure on project margin influences the sales (calculation) and execution significantly as the room for manoeuvre decreases and a single mistake can endanger the entire project/company stability
Our Approach
PwC can help you create a roadmap for achieving required project or program excellence to safeguard your project acquisition & execution and meet set project/company targets.
PwC has developed a procedural and maturity framework & benchmark that defines capital project elements and standards across project functions and along the entire project life cycle. This well-proven maturity framework (see on the right) allows in a first step a consistent and holistic assessment of the actual status of the project/program. In a second step the target picture of the project/program is evaluated on basis of the assessed project/program result, industry specific benchmarks and PwC’s industry good practices. In a third step tailor-made recommendations are developed to achieve projects/program targeted maturity.
Added Value
Benefits of using PwC’s capital project management solution include the following:
- Our strong track record, global experience and local know-how will be shared to reduce project risks and identify and materialize opportunities
- Our frameworks, best practice knowledge base, supporting an accelerated blueprint oriented approach
- Our unique team mix of senior management consultants, leveraging their personal industry as well as consulting experience
- Independent and detailed view on the maturity across the entire project value chain
- A clear, organized and consistent approach to project or program implementation
- Enhancements to time, schedule, quality compliance and cost reductions
- Development of processes into a prudent, transparent, and auditable record of management’s actions and decisions
Engineering & Construction Management
Projects are delayed and facing serious cost overruns
Nowadays projects are characterized by an challenging or even sometimes by a too optimistic initial planning. In case of an unsuitable project setup, both on engineering or on construction side, it is not unlikely, that avoidable issues getting to real serious problems
Unexpected “surprises” during project execution
As the engineered products and/or designed plants represent the heart of operations, deficiencies usually reveal prompt in a sensitive and continuous manner, not seldomly in line with eroding margins and cost-intensive nonconformance costs.
Outdated engineering and construction structures
Sophisticated products/plants are not any more a guarantee to be successful. Outdated structures, over-engineered - so called “gold plated” - products and a rising claim awareness of customers putting more and more companies into sensitive troubles.
Our Approach
Based on client’s request for support, we generally assess in a short period your project or organization to get comprehensive insights on the company’s proceeding. This allows for identification of weak points and improvement measures. Based on our assessment we adapt our engineering and construction improvement approaches exactly to your individual business requirements. This ensures an efficient, quick and focused support.
The identification of root causes for existing challenges and the corresponding improvements are crucial for project success. It will help to bring your project or organization back on track and even further: Back to pole position.
Engineering
Set-up and enforce engineering management
Set-up and reactiviation of engineering programs
Design-to-Value and cost down programs
Standardization / Modularization
Engineering collaboration / outsourcing
Construction
Set-up and enforce site management
Construction site processes and governance requirements
Definition of quality control and assurance procedures
Implementation of state-of-the-art "digital" tools
Engineering integration and chance processes on site
Added Value
The PwC CP&I engineering improvement approach will improve your engineering and construction practice in a holistic manner: Break through a continuously grown product/plant complexity, set up the right management and tune your operations in accordance to the today’s requirements, mostly in a tough global environment. Strong management, reduced internal costs, less project risks or a boosted value of your plants/products will restore your competiveness and your global market leadership.
Our approach covers all aspects relevant for your engineering and construction proceedings along your full value chain, allowing us to structure our services best to your actual needs with the clear target to unfold the optimum of your organization:
- Reduced costs, thus higher margins
- Strong management, thus more successful projects
- Reduced complexity, thus less non-conformance costs, less claims and less internal costs
- Restored success, thus business targets are achieved
Project Review & Recovery
Project transparency
75% of all capital projects do not meet its specific targets with respect to cost, time and quality. Often project progress and upcoming costs are not transparent. Procrastination can lead to massive recovery measures for revitalization in order to stop further losses and delays.
Early identification of risks
Project evaluations are often only based on the available financial figures. Our experience shows project risks are often not sufficiently reflected within the financial figures, hence a project due diligence is required for its early identification.
Identification of risk root cause
Due to day-to-day and routine project business responsible decision makers face the challenge of not identifying the root causes of their major project risks.
Our Approach
By conducting a thorough analysis of key project documents (e.g. project status reports, risk and claim registers, cost calculation and time schedule) and interviews with your project/tender management team, PwC will gain insights into the basis of the project’s organization, its contractual setup as well as its internal and external interfaces and technological particularities.
PwC/s review method combines experience from numerous capital projects and industry best practices on the one hand, while it is also adjustable to the specific industry requirements and preferred level of detail, on the other. Our project review method will assist in identifying and quantifying the actual progress and evaluating the time and cost to completion. Furthermore we support the client in implementing the required actions to bring your project back on track. For the early safeguarding of your project we support our clients already during tender phase.
Added Value
Benefits of using PwC/s Capital Project Review Method include the following:
- Regain full transparency of project status and identification of the risk areas and root causes to enable informed decision making after the execution of a project review
- Definition and implementation of appropriate mitigation measures to enable stable finalization of the project by avoiding further surprises during a project recovery
- Improve tender development & cost down - execution concept, procurement and engineering optimization, contract and calculation review
- Support project execution, stabilization and recovery - project status and EaC assessment, cost down, schedule reliability, dispute readiness
- Comprehensive understanding of complex contractual setup and potential pitfalls
- Insights in bidding strategies of contractual contractors