A prime contractor to the US Department of Energy (DOE) engaged with ARC to provide an independent review and assessment of its information technology strategic procurement plan for a large, complex, and environmentally sensitive new industrial facility.
Client Challenges
Faced with the challenge of planning, acquiring, and commissioning site-wide information and automation systems for a large, complex, and extremely environmentally sensitive plant, this well-respected government contractor generated a number of detailed documents describing the overall plan. Consistent with its practice of engaging leading outside experts to review its programs and approaches to help ensure transparency, the contractor engaged ARC Advisory Group to provide an independent review of the strategic plan for acquiring and commissioning these sophisticated systems. Complicating this task, was the fact that some of the applications were incumbent legacy systems while others ranged from "off the shelf" software to highly site-specific applications.
ARC Solution
ARC proposed an engagement that included three sequential steps
- A thorough document review and preliminary report by senior ARC consultants
- A site visit and workshop covering the plant procurement plan and practices in more depth
- A final report representing the completed review, including both general recommendations on approaches and specific recommendations for actions in the next few months.
Following its initial review of the information system strategic plan, including the plant-wide automation system architecture, ARC identified several initial areas for improvement. During the site visit that followed, ARC conducted an on-site workshop to discuss with the client their gaps and to work out a path forward. ARC's final report, issued in August 2015, summarized all findings and included recommendations focused on improved procedures and information flows. The recommendations are based on the ISA 95 manufacturing model.
Results
The client was pleased with the project results, is implementing the recommendations, and expressed a desire to continue to use ARC's expertise in future phases of the project.