Many projects aimed at upgrading, renewing and expanding wastewater treatment facilities will involve steel fabrication. History – and probably your own experience, tells you that those fabrications are likely to cost more than the budget, take longer to complete and will add complexity and delays to the overall project.
The future can look different to the past and none of those undesirable outcomes are inevitable. The first question is to understand why steel fabrications are so prone to significant project variances. The answer lies in a disjointed process that leads to incomplete or inaccurate project scoping and design, misaligned components and costly late reworks.
Steel Fabrications in Wastewater Projects
Steel fabrications can be used for anything from steel walkway structures and stairs to complete building and support structures intended to house pumping stations and other essential plant.
Typically, surveying, scoping, option assessment, design, detailing, fabrication and installation are seen as separate phases involving different organisations. Everyone is focused on delivering their part of the project. The disconnects only become apparent when it’s time to install the structure.
How much of a problem is this? Project variances of 50% or more are common.
Intelligent Integration Delivers Certainty
In a better process, steel fabrication expertise is integrated into each phase. This ensures that what looks OK in a CAD system is buildable, and represents the most efficient and cost-effective way to deliver the project.
A more streamlined, efficient and low-risk process exists. It’s what we in FTE call intelligent integration. By applying this methodology and ensuring our engineers and designers are involved at each stage we’ve proved that variances can be reduced to well below 5%.
Urgency and Control
Upgrading water treatment facilities is a key objective of AMP 8 and is certain to feature in AMP 9. Ofwat recently put an £88bn price tag on improvement works. With such a large volume of high-priority investment it’s essential to deliver value for money and to complete schemes quickly and efficiently.
Applying intelligent integration to projects involving steel fabrication will take out much of the uncertainty and help investment budgets stretch further.
If you like to explore better ways to deliver steel fabrication projects with greater certainty and control, head over to our information hub.
Or contact: info@fourtees.co.uk
