Cost and Schedule Impacts of Information Management

The engineer-procure-construct (EPC) process is a set of interrelated activities that begins with the owner’s pre-project planning and extends to successful plant startup. The process not only involves activities that may be performed by owners, contractors, suppliers, and others, but includes numerous occasions where information is exchanged between two or more parties.

Thanks to advances in electronic technology, EPC participants now have the potential to manage shared information strategically in order to improve project cost and schedule. Despite this potential, however, no specific tool has been developed to allow the industry to examine the benefits of information management technologies.

The Construction Industry Institute recognized the need for such a tool for information management technologies. It therefore established the Information Management Impacts Research Team to study the problem and find solutions. The research team in turn developed a methodology, and a software tool, to quantify the cost and schedule benefits of information management on an EPC project.

The conclusions of the research team demonstrate that the benefits of information management strategies can be significant. Project information needs to be integrated, preserved, and leveraged throughout the entire project team, and the exchange of information must be facilitated across all organizational boundaries. By doing so, information technology strategies can have a significant impact on project cost and schedule.

The efforts of the research team are summarized in this publication. The reader is encouraged to use the tool that has been developed to explore the potential of information management technologies. That tool can be found in CII Implementation Resource 125-2, Determining the Impact of Process Change on the EPC Process.