Challenge

Large IOU Electric Delivery was looking to develop a comprehensive Material Management and Construction Management program for their transmission line substation construction projects. Large IOU wanted to achieve a simple goal that the project teams in the office and field teams needed to know what was happening in real-time. Their main needs for this program were:
  • Improve collaboration of their field teams with their engineering department in a seamless manner.
  • Improve communication of issues related to material, right-of-way, permitting, and other construction challenges back to the design and project management teams and reduce impact of these issues on construction delays.
  • Improve tracking of project progress across their entire program.
  • Reduce impact of material issues on construction by catching problems early and keeping vendors accountable. As the Capex increased to more than $700M a year, material issues slowly crept up and created a multi-million-dollar extra expenditure (like for material returns, crew stand-down time, etc.) as the construction contractors issued change orders to Large IOU for material issues in the field.

Solution

Think Power Solutions was hired by Large IOU to address these issues. Think Power is performing construction and material management and addressing Large IOU's problems as below:
  • Think Power personnel tracked real-time project progress in the field using Think Power LOGS. The collected data was automatically fed into Think Power ONE dashboards that could then be viewed directly by project managers.
  • Engineering teams were made aware of issues as soon as they arose in the field with pixel perfect images and documentation. This is leading to fast resolution of issues and significant cost-savings.
  • Significant reductions in matting costs has been provided by Think Power Solutions through accurate field data collection of mat locations and their actual usage vis-à-vis contractor billed usage.
  • Based on our data collection in the field, construction management, and material management system, we brought down the material issues for Large IOU by helping Large IOU quantify issues with actionable intelligence. This was achieved by using an effective data collection system in the field and automated analytics of collected data based on Large IOU standards on Think Power ONE dashboards.
  • Classified material issues (example: NEMA pad issues, welding issues, seam grind issues, etc.) identified in the field provides valuable QA/QC feedback to the material vendors to improve their QC process in their manufacturing plants.

Program Annual Spend - $1.5B