These days there is a popular shift to ‘engineering workflow management systems‘ in the EPC market and software developers are stepping up with a variety of tools and systems addressed specifically to the EPC project lifecycle. Being highly specialized, such solutions offer notable benefits, including savings in costs and time, and also help ensure quality by creating a connection between ‘planned’ and ‘actual’ works and enabling engineering teams to track work in a proactive manner. In this post, I will explore what we mean by digitized engineering workflow management and why it is so critical to successful project delivery.

First, what is an engineering workflow? Simply put, it is a ‘flow of work’ or a step-by-step guide that shows in detail how work moves through the various tasks and activities from initiation to completion.  

Consider a typical engineer. His job involves a huge amount of documents and drawings, all of which are managed through the workflow. So, the engineering workflow is nothing but a series of very carefully designed smaller workflows that define a larger work process.

In larger projects, an engineering workflow can be extremely complex, requiring careful planning and consideration.  These days most organizations rely on software to help manage their essential workflows (and help their administrators keep tight control over reviews, approvals, and deliverables) and these software systems help manage document actions correctly at each step without needing to manually drive or oversee each task.

Now let’s look a little closer at what makes engineering workflow management solutions so effective, starting with the topic of ‘Workflow Configuration’.

Many, if not most, engineering workflows are linear. Thus, engineering organizations are constantly finding ways to better configure those workflows and make them more efficient, especially when it comes to tasks like the review and approval process which are critical to successful work completion.  

Review and Approval begins when a manager has defined the parameters of a document or deliverable including its owners, deadlines, and the various needs and constraints of the involved parties. When this has been done, a workflow administrator or project manager ie the creator of that workflow will set about identifying the key members of the team responsible for reviewing and approving the documents/drawings. Then he must define whether the reviews will be open to multiple reviewers or just one or two, whether the approvals should be unanimous or majority votes and other important criteria affecting the review/approval process with the kind of approval/review process usually depending on the kind of document and the compliance requirements for that location/organization. Software developers have taken all this into account and have created software features that allow managers to authorize who has a vote and who doesn’t, including any third parties who have been granted access to the system. In other words, the system admin first needs to clearly define goals and timelines within the system, and then the engineering workflow management system can display the exact ‘percentage progress’ at each step so that managers know what work has been completed and what is still pending. For the same reason, the administrator creating the Workflow should be careful to mark progress based on the effort it takes to complete each step rather than the number of steps in the workflow.

Next, let us look at workflows used for Reporting. Reporting is a mission-critical feature of workflow management and these days software developers are including features to address this as well with the more advanced engineering workflow management systems allowing managers to track employee performance and flag data silos immediately, so that action can be taken to optimize the workflow. Another very useful feature we see nowadays is digital Audit Trails. This feature allows administrators and project managers to effortlessly track any and all actions taken from the system (which contains the configured engineering workflow) in order to zero in on any bottlenecks, errors, missteps, or unauthorized actions.

So as you can see,  a digital engineering workflow management system with pre-configured workflows built-in is highly efficient and highly cost-effective, allowing its users freedom from routine tasks while ensuring they follow every step as prescribed and making it possible for everyone to be in the loop without confusion. It also allows a great deal of flexibility to managers and empowers them with accurate and up-to-date data about work progress, which in turn allows senior managers to make decisions quickly when required. You could say that such a system actually improves the engineering process as a whole and this impacts the entire downstream project process as the project progresses through procurement and construction and handover. By assigning specific tasks to employees and streamlining the execution of those tasks in the most time-efficient way possible, such systems help integrate planning, execution, monitoring, collaboration, and delivery on one digital platform which ensures that work is delivered on time and within the prescribed budget.