AspenTech’s Capital Project Cost Estimation Software for Asset Optimization

Client Profile: Established in 1977, SK Engineering & Construction (SK E&C) is a global top-tier city developer and infrastructure builder based in South Korea. It is one of the 96 companies making up the SK Group, a leading South Korean conglomerate.  SK E&C has executed more than 25 local and international projects across sectors that include oil and gas, petrochemical, power, environmental protection, industrial, civil, building, housing, and services. SK E&C is renowned for its plant business around the world, from feasibility studies to design, procurement, construction, and all cycles to provide customer value as a total solution provider, upgrading the status of the company.

The Challenges: Factors such as controlling cost, regulatory hurdles, affordability, schedule, and production are the key elements of most EPC (engineering, procurement & construction) projects. By identifying these hurdles early on, delays and failures can be avoided. EPC contractors have to continually evolve and need to recognize that digital technologies are disrupting the industry and addressing the challenges of low profitability/productivity, performance, skilled labor shortage, and sustainability concerns.  So what SK E&C required was a single, integrated platform to support engineering and cost estimation, to reduce cycle time, and improve project outcomes.  After a stringent selection process, the company chose AspenTech’s estimating software suite that provides a single economic model for concept evaluation; detailed design, plant revamp and turnaround projects, as well as connects to AspenTech’s process engineering software. This results in faster and more efficient concept evaluation, which helps optimize the final design of the asset.

Solution Deployment and Effectiveness: SK E&C deployed AspenTech’s Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE) to produce more accurate project cost estimates and bids, faster and more efficiently across different countries. This helps to accelerate project execution by using volumetric models and one common costing method from conceptual to detailed engineering, leveraging the speed, agility, and transparency of AspenTech’s solution. Based on highly scalable engineering models of process equipment, ACCE accurately predicts total installed costs of process equipment and associated bulks, instrumentation, electrical, and civil. With this software SK E&C can quantify schedule adjustments and automatically scale the size of a project to either increase or decrease capacity for capital cost using actual equipment rather than scaling factors. This unique approach is proprietary to Aspen Economic Evaluation cost estimation software; and is constantly upgraded to add new functionality, improve performance, increase ease of use, and update cost basis inside the system.

Benefits: Aspen ACCE is used across the lifecycle of process plant capital projects in the oil and gas, refining, and chemical industries. For example, the deployment of ACCE software helped a refinery get started with minimal scope definition, increase estimation accuracy, as well as save time and cost. AspenTech’s ACCE software has helped SK E&C maximize efficiency, accuracy, and flexibility. By deploying Aspen’s ACCE software to achieve asset optimization early in the design phase, SK E&C can achieve engineering productivity, generate new revenue streams, increase win rate, and reduce risk.

Keywords: AspenTech’s Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE), SK E&C, South Korea, EPC Projects, ARC Advisory Group