Pre-Outage Project Controls

Measuring, tracking and close monitoring on project performance, progress and outcomes to prevent costly time and budget overruns are critical to business’ maximizing their value



One key area is the link between the procurement function and finance. All contracts/purchase orders should be issued at least two weeks prior to the beginning of an outage. This will enable the project controller sufficient time to build a tracking system to provide a methodology designed to track and manage the daily cost of all vendors. The master cost report will be used daily to update the project team on progress and forecast costs at completion against budget and previous day’s forecast.


If utilized and communicated to the project manager this discipline will result in savings from tracking schedule shifts and eliminating over-scheduling of manpower, help the treasury management, whether it be foreign currency to domestic interst rates and eliminating superfluous contractor crews when work shifted from one time period to another and risks associated with the project from a cost perspective (weather delays, material delays, extra work, stand by time, etc).