Bidding on Alignment Sheets: Expectation vs. Reality
Producing a competitive bid is crucial to the survival of any energy service provider. While the energy industry starts to ramp up, it’s more important than ever for service providers to produce competitive estimates that secure projects. It continues to be a buyer’s market, since the volume of new capital projects has yet to saturate the services marketplace. This drives service providers to take out their hatchets and slash prices. This is commonindustry practice, but it is not necessarily a best practice. Arriving at that competitive bid requires a company to work smart and to coordinate their groups. Tight coordination between the proposal writers and the team who will get the job done is required. Left to their own, these two groups will often arrive at vastly different estimates, and a vastly different bottom line. By working together, they can create a bid that is competitive, and, importantly, achievable. Because blowing through your client’s budget and schedule isn’t a good way to win additional work.
Alignment sheets stand out as a key deliverable in the lifecycle of a pipeline capital project. Components of a competitive Alignment Sheet bid include:
historic performance data on similar projects with similar deliverables
specific requirements & quantities of deliverables
project schedule
definitions of the review & checking process
To start, an estimate of drawing count must be calculated. This is defined by two factors: drawing size and scale. Remember that if a profile is required, in addition to the plan view, this may influence drawing size and scale.
Next, you must know what information the drawing will reflect. Each band of data requires man-hours to address. The purpose of the drawing will define the information requirements. For example FERC filing, Issue for Bid, Issue for Construction, As-Built, etc. Each of these examples serve a different purpose and will be requested for different phases of a capital project. Each phase has different requirements and considerations. When bidding multiple phases, it is important to understand how the data builds and is reused and how the drawings evolve.
Project schedule will influence the estimate as well. Aggressive schedules may require additional resources or the use of overtime, thus affecting a bid. Automation is vital to producing a quality drawing for an aggressive schedule with minimal resources. Lulls in the project schedule are equally challenging as resources will ramp up and down depending on the workload. Also, when considering schedule and man-hours, remember that multiple reviews are required to produce a quality alignment sheet. Most common are design/drafting reviews, internal engineering reviews and client reviews. Defining which reviews will occur and how many cycles of each will be performed is imperative. Defining how reviews occur is also important, for example via digital red-lining or traditional plotting & mark-up. The allowable timeframes for review must also be defined.
Regardless of how the data is acquired, base datasets often include the following layers:
pipeline centerline
property tracts
environmental
archaeological
crossings
water bodies
roads
foreign pipelines
rail
utilities
workspaces
permanent easement
temporary workspace
extra temporary workspace
Just a note: laying out the workspaces can take a significant amount of time and effort by engineers and designers.
The alignment sheet windows themselves must be generated and adjusted where necessary. Background imagery must be incorporated and again the initial load may be superseded as the project progresses. As survey is performed and collected, it too will be checked and incorporated. The alignment sheet border template must be configured with plan, profile, and bands such as material, environmental, property, station, class location, land use, construction type, etc. Labeling features, workspaces, profiles, etc. are also key components of the alignment sheet. GIS typically offers more options to automate such labels, but advances on the CAD platform have brought closer parity. After the previously described has been established and data population progressed to the project gate’s requirements, alignment sheets are “cut” and issued for review.
Review Gates
Accounting for the review gates and time windows are critical to producing an accurate alignment sheet bid and a high-quality deliverable. The initial Review Gate is typically the design/drafting review which focuses on the drawing itself. This check will include drawing accuracy, such as:
title blocks
labels
dimensions
callouts
As well as aesthetics such as proper page breaks and clarity of information.
In addition, project standards will be checked, often client provided, including:
text styles
line styles
colors
symbology
dimensioning styles
A percentage of drawings will require additional correction or clean-up and then a second drafting/design review.
Engineering Review
The next Review Gate is typically performed by the engineering team. This review focuses on the design and “constructability” of the pipeline. Verifying material, coating, bends, crossings, workspace arrangement, valve locations, construction types, and a host of other design aspects dependent on the phase of the project. Again, a percentage of the drawings will require additional correction or clean-up and then a second engineering review. The last Review Gate is typically performed the client’s project team. The client review is often a page-by-page examination of all the above. And yet again, a percentage of the drawings will require additional correction or clean-up and then a second client review. Knowing average percentages for rework at each review stage will be very helpful in producing an accurate bid.
Work Breakdown Structure
One must apply manhours to what has been described here to each Alignment Sheet using a work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS facilitates the man-hour estimate and schedule assembling. In addition, the WBS supports progressing each deliverable using a calculated earned value. Earned value provides a clear account of current state and forecast. Benchmarking bids against performance is crucial to a firm’s ability to learn and improve both. Service providers must leverage automation to simply be in the game. Those that define their processes, train their staff and benchmark performance gain advantages that often set them apart from the competition. Bidding alignment sheets competitively and then achieving the man-hour estimate and schedule fosters credibility with clients. Developing those actions into a routine for clients leads to no-bid, repeat project work, which is the goal.
