Mega Project Economics
Mega project support in Aspen Capital Cost Estimator software (formerly KBase) uniquely enables owners and EPCs to effectively estimate the world's largest mega projects. This seamlessly enables multiple contractors to merge sub-project estimates, employ a common basis, and break dimensional, size and scale limits.
The Challenge
With important decisions made early in the capital project cycle having a major impact on project economics, mega projects push the limits of engineering, fabrication, construction and transportation resources.
Producing a FEED estimate on a mega project involves splitting the estimating work among several estimating teams and in closely coordinating between the owner-operator and the lead engineering concern.
Mega projects also present a range of challenges to the estimating team. Sizes and dimensions of bulks and equipment often exceed traditional limits. Project resources, such as number of work forces, numbers and locations of contractors and so forth are often beyond traditional limits. Resource limitations need to reviewed and analyzed critically and comprehensively. Also, equipment lists and bills of material require the size and scope of reports to be beyond what are conventionally encountered.
The Solution
The new release 7.2 of Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE) introduces breakthrough scalability to support the world's largest petrochemical mega projects which typically require multiple engineering organizations and large teams to design, estimate and construct.
- Aspen Capital Cost Estimator (ACCE) provides estimating professionals with a unique tool for rapidly and reliably conducting conceptual estimates at the earliest stages of mega project definition.
- ACCE 7.2 significantly relaxes size (such as piping diameter), dimension and scale constraints in estimates well beyond the limits of the world's largest petrochemical projects.
- Until the present, software limitations prevented decision makers from modeling an entire mega project multi-plant facility as one integrated project . ACCE's new merging capability enables separate estimating teams to work and then combine results into one composite model.
- Reporting capability and flexibility have been greatly expanded.
- Performance of the system has been increased by orders of magnitude, making handling a mega project in a software model practical and feasible.
The Benefit
Using the latest release of ACCE within the aspenONE Engineering suite, the lead EPC on one of the world's largest projects has reduced the time required to produce an estimate from 3-6 months to 1-4 weeks.
BEFORE AND AFTER WORK FLOW:
Before
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After
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