InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

September 14, 1998

Constructive Computing

Construction and engineering firms use IT to make monumental projects seem ordinary

By Rich Levin

InformationWeek 500 Menu

CONSTRUCTION & ENGINEERING

View industry chart

View company closeup chart

With data from Hoovers Online

From dams to space centers, from international airports to petrochemical plants, America's construction and engineering companies make the monumental seem mundane. And they're using IT to do it. By applying the same planning, process, and people skills that transform an idea from blueprint to building, the hard-hat sector is hammering away at globalization, technology standardization, custom applications, and collaboration via the Web.

Their big projects-IT projects, that is-include extending enterprise networks to remote corners of the world, creating custom software solutions to complex problems, and using middleware to remain free of single-vendor technologies. "This is a sector that doesn't shrink from the largest engineering or construction projects-or the largest IT challenges," says J.P. Morgenthal, president of NC.Focus, an IT consulting firm. "They're driven by engineering requirements, and that affects their approach to IT."

If any single catalyst is driving change and innovation in the construction and engineering industry, it's globalization. With construction projects running from three months to three years, multiple sites are always in various states of commission or decommission. That requires a flexible and extensible computing infrastructure.

"Doing this in North America isn't difficult," says John Bailey, principal VP and manager of computing infrastructure at Bechtel Corp., an $11.3 billion engineering, procurement, and construction company in San Francisco. But doing it "in the four corners of the world" is much more difficult, involving both ramp up of technology and staff, and a "ramp down," says Bailey.

Bechtel is tackling the problem in a unique way. It has created standard setups for server platforms so that its IT staff in North America can quickly pre-package entire enterprise networks and ship them to the field for rapid deployment. Bechtel has identified specific application requirement categories and, acting as its own system integrator, has created standard application platforms. Canned packages include a desktop application suite; an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) system; document management; computer-aided design; messaging; and file and print services.

"We now have a standard build for 80% of our servers," Bailey says. "An EPC, CAD, or document-management server in Houston is designed and built exactly the same as an EPC, CAD, or document-management server in Singapore. It guarantees our applications will work. It's really helped us support the rapid globalization of the business."

Of Bechtel's 700 Windows NT servers supporting 21,000 users globally, fully 600 are standardized and were engineered centrally. The approach has saved Bechtel at least $500,000 this year. "Going forward, we see nothing but an upside to that," Bailey says.

The Windows Standard
That brings up another kind of standardization that is taking place-the adoption of Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems. "We love homogeneity," says John Voeller, chief technology officer and senior partner at Black & Veatch LLP, in Kansas City, Mo., a $2 billion engineering firm that builds power, process, water, and waste-water facilities worldwide. "We're not concerned whether [Microsoft] controls the keys to the kingdom. If we were still facing the decision of whether to use any of 11 different operating systems, we'd have a pretty ugly environment."

Black & Veatch's just-released five-year IT plan calls for the establishment of Windows as its primary server, desktop, and mobile operating system. Voeller says Microsoft has succeeded where others have failed by making thousands of applications available in a common environment. NT Server supports 8,000 Windows 95 desktop users at the company, while NT Workstation is being used for applications such as 3-D VRML-based viewing, CAD, and mathematical analysis.

"Microsoft has NT to the point where it pretty well tackles all but the most mission-critical requirements," Voeller says.

Voeller's team avoids being locked in to any technology at the application data and interoperability levels by using its own internally developed file format and object interoperability layers. All of Black & Veatch's applications generate a neutral file format, and the file formats of commercial applications are converted to the company's internal standard. The company has also included parts of two competing object standards-Microsoft's Component Object Model and the Object Management Group's Corba-within its own object brokering middleware.

"We've created an environment that will play in any regime," says Voeller. "It's provided us with great power to stabilize our applications."

Customized IT
Indeed, while platform standardization is an important trend, construction and engineering companies are still involved in some highly complex, customized IT work. At Fluor Corp., a $14 billion engineering, construction, maintenance, and services company in Irvine, Calif., one such project, implemented this year, lets chemical engineers design pipe installations in petrochemical plants. "Refineries have lots of components, and they're all connected by pipe," says Dennis Benner, VP and CIO at Fluor, which made the InformationWeek 500 Honorable Mention list. "You spend a lot of money figuring out where to place the various components."

It's a task that, until this year, was performed manually, consuming teams of engineers and months of engineering time. Now, using Fluor's homegrown system, chemical engineers can move plant components around on a computer screen, and the computer automatically repipes the design, using a rule-based system. The system measures how many feet of each kind of pipe is required, and instantly calculates the costs. "You keep fiddling with it until you have your least-cost piping arrangement, which can save several millions of dollars on a project," says Benner. "We can do in a few mouse clicks what some people spend four months doing manually."

Using expert systems to tackle front-end design can have a huge impact on total project cost. A study by the Construction Industry Institute at the University of Texas found that 80% of a construction project's total costs are determined-and can be controlled-in the first 20% of a project's life cycle. "That's where the money gets saved," says Rusty Haggard, an analyst with CII. "Once you get out to the field and start doing construction, there's very little you can do to lower costs."

Morrison Knudsen Corp., a $1.6 billion construction and engineering company in Boise, Idaho, applies customized IT solutions early in aproject, but also at the back end, in an effort to better understand and control field expenses.

"Custom solutions don't get the attention, because Microsoft or Sun or Oracle aren't selling them, and they're very specific to an engineering discipline," says Jim House, director of IS for Morrison Knudsen. "But we're deploying more of those kinds of applications, on the front end and in the field."

Opportunities To Experiment
With 8,500 employees in 80 countries, and with projects under way on six continents, Morrison Knudsen has many opportunities to experiment with custom engineering solutions in remote field locations. One such test involved using small data recorders to count how many tons of dirt its heavy mining "drag line" machines moved, and how many seconds it took to move the dirt. After running the application for about six months, Morrison Knudsen's engineers studied the results, and were able to optimize the field methodology.

"It allowed us to train our operators to run the machinery in a manner which was less taxing on the equipment," House says. "That reduced the maintenance costs on the machine by $70,000. We got our return on investment with the first repair savings."

Little Web Interest
In general, construction and engineering companies don't put a lot of effort into doing business on the Web. "Selling bridges across the Internet-that's not where it's at for us," laughs Bechtel's Bailey. One reason is that their far-flung projects don't always have access to high-quality Internet connections. Instead, these companies rely heavily on their own wide area networks.

"In a business where you've got lump-sum projects with penalty clauses for every day that you're late, if it takes more than one minute to transfer a CAD drawing from one side of the planet to another, that's not good enough," says David Moskowitz, a telecommunications expert with Productivity Solutions Inc., a networking and application development consulting firm.

Increasingly, construction and engineering companies are looking to the Web as a way to support collaboration among the many people and tasks involved in a project. "Certainly, the industry is looking at the seamless integration of all these processes with the Web, and many are firing up efforts to make such integration a reality," says analyst Haggard. "It's becoming a strategic technology."

But it will take time to get there, largely because Web standards continue to evolve. "Collaboration is the future," says Bailey. "But we're not where we need to be because the Web is moving so quickly that we haven't been able to nail it down."

People Smarts
Companies in this sector are also paying more attention to staff issues. "We have a very bright chemical engineer who operates our [pipe-design] tool," says Fluor's Benner. "If you or I had the tool, that wouldn't buy us a heck of a lot. The smarts will always come from our people."

To that end, some companies are redoubling their efforts to improve training, and deliver IT environments that foster creativity and long-term dedication. "The biggest challenge this year is training local talent to support the global infrastructure, and to support the applications," says Bailey at Bechtel. "We don't want to do it with North American people. We want to train local people, and give something back to global communities where Bechtel operates."

Black & Veatch's Voeller agrees. The company did away with its CIO position this year as a way of putting the focus on its entire IT staff and not a single individual. "We want our people to own every success, and we want them to have an awareness of any failures," Voeller says. A new structure matches up IT staff and end users in projects that are managed by an executive sponsor.

The new structure, Voeller says, has helped the company complete every one of its IT projects this year on time and on budget. That's a foundation worth building on.

Back to InformationWeek 500 menu page

Back to This Week's Issue

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page