Commissioning can be complex, and there are a million different pathways to complete a project.  Some of the paths lead to success, while many of the other paths will lead to project delays and cost over-runs.  Just like snakes and ladders, take the wrong path and you will have many setbacks in your project.

So of the million different pathways to complete a project, what is the best way?  Is each project expected to pick a project execution strategy and hope for the best during commissioning?  Or is there an industry-leading method to deliver your project on-time and on-budget?

While you can take a theoretical approach to implementing your commissioning projects, this doesn’t exactly tell you what is the lowest risk approach and how to implement each commissioning step.  Instead, you need a practical approach to executing commissioning in the field in a real-world environment full of messy problems and challenges to solve.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a resource that showed you the lowest risk approach to complete your commissioning project on-time and on-budget?  No more guesswork, just learn the best approach to commissioning and startup.

This is exactly what the Integrated Commissioning Method (ICM) is.  ICM is the industry-proven approach to commissioning and startup to deliver your projects on-time and on-budget.  ICM gathers all the industry best practices for commissioning and lays them out in an easy-to-follow step-by-step process to execute your commissioning projects.

Integrated Approach to Commissioning

Today’s projects are extremely complex.  We need to take an integrated approach to commissioning to have the commissioning mindset part of all phases of the project. We need a more advanced commissioning method that considers commissioning during all stages of the project.

Commissioning is not simply just testing the equipment at the end of the project. The commissioning team cannot show up for the last two or three months of the project, test some equipment, and place it into service. It’s much more involved than that in today’s complex projects. We need to start with the end in mind as early in the project as possible to have an integrated process. 

Commissioning is integrated into all processes throughout the project to ensure that the right decisions are being made and that the project is going to come together during the commissioning phase as it needs to work successfully. We need a new approach to commissioning.

A New Approach to Commissioning

Most projects spend all of their time in the design phase and the construction phase. Unfortunately, commissioning is an afterthought. We need to get away from that and have commissioning as an upfront process early in the project. Most projects sadly do not involve the commissioning team early enough in the project. What you will hear on a lot of projects is, “Well, it has always been done that way”. But the last project was late, and the last project was over budget. Why would we want to do the same on the next project? We need to take a different approach for the next project so it does not continue with the same, being late and over budget. We need a new approach to avoid this from happening.

The commissioning industry lacks structure when we are talking about these complex projects. There needs to be a structured process to follow to ensure that systems are going to work at the end of the project. Commissioning can no longer be ad-hoc. We need a structured process. Where in the past, maybe it was possible for the commissioning team to show up, bump test a motor and pump, and get the pump running.  But with all of our automated systems and integrated automation, that does not work anymore.

Commissioning needs to be a much more upfront integrated process and a structured process to ensure that our complex projects are going to work successfully. Commissioning has really not kept pace with the automation technology and the digital transformation that is taking place. We all know that the pace of change is increasing at a rapid rate where new technology is being introduced. The commissioning industry has not kept pace with this, not kept up with the updates that are going on. We need to harness the new systems and processes that are available to us to ensure that our projects are successful.

The industry is behind and is only now starting to catch up to the transformation that has been taking place, and we need an advanced commissioning process for today’s digital systems. There are many superior, sophisticated processes, and sophisticated tools that exist. We need to take advantage of these sophisticated processes and tools to address today’s challenges in our commissioning projects and that is exactly what the Integrated Commissioning Method is.

Integrated Commissioning Method 

What is the Integrated Commissioning Method? It’s the culmination of years of experience and industry best practices laid out in a step-by-step process to deliver your projects on-time and on-budget. There is no longer a need to guess the steps to take, ICM gives you the detailed commissioning process from project concept to handover to the owner.  Every step of the project has commissioning in mind to make system integration go much smoother at the end of the project.

The Integrated Commissioning Method has been recently used to deliver a 5.2 billion HVDC project on-time and on-budget. ICM is really what is missing in the commissioning industry, where we need a structured process to deliver our commissioning projects on-time and on-budget.

• Without having a structured process (a structured method of how to integrate these complex systems), then how can we proactively plan our commissioning activities?
• How do we know what needs to take place during IFAT testing, pre-commissioning testing, commissioning, and startup?
• How do we know what needs to take place during each of these phases of the project to ensure that we are taking the least risk approach to ensure that our systems are going to work?

The Integrated Commissioning Method ensures that the right decisions are made during the early stages of the project during planning, execution of earlier design, and construction phases, to ensure that commissioning of our systems will be successful. 

Who Needs to Know about the Integrated Commissioning Method?

Everybody involved in the project should know about the Integrated Commissioning Method. The commissioning team needs to understand the structured process of how to implement and commission our automation systems. That would include the commissioning managers, commissioning engineers, commissioning technicians, everyone that is part of the commissioning team. As well as that the design and the construction teams need to understand ICM, and how the decisions they are going to make earlier in the project are going to impact the success of commissioning.

Project managers certainly need to know about ICM. They need to know how the project needs to be structured to ensure that the right phases are taking place at the right time. To ensure commissioning success project sponsors should certainly be aware at least at a high level of what the Integrated Commissioning Method is. They need to recognize the importance of commissioning and ensure that the right resources, individuals, and time are allotted for a proper commissioning process.  The project owner and the project operators need to understand ICM as well to understand the process that their new facilities are going to go through so that they can receive a quality product in the end. 

Steps of the Integrated Commissioning Method

Let’s go through the critical points of each phase of the project to show how ICM can be applied:

Project Initiation, Project Planning, and Tools 

• Commissioning starts at the very beginning of the project as decisions are being made on the project delivery.
• The project procurement contracting strategy is when commissioning needs to get involved to help shape the project to start with the end in mind.

Project Planning

• The initial project planning needs to take a risk-based approach when preparing the project sequence, to mitigate delays and not defer issues to later during the commissioning stage.
• The commissioning team helps other project participants understand their decisions and ensure that risk is being mitigated at the earliest opportunity

Design Phase and Procurement

• The commissioning sequence defines the order of construction priorities, and therefore the order of design priorities.
• Having the commissioning sequence established by the commissioning team earlier in the project helps the design team understand priorities, what needs to be completed, when to achieve commissioning milestones.
• The design team benefits from operational input to make designed systems easier to work with and have a lower life cycle cost. 
• Prior to procurement contracts being issued to market, they need to capture all the commissioning requirements as well as IFAT requirements. 

Procurement

• Integrated Factory Acceptance Testing (IFAT) is an important part of the procurement process.
• The IFAT requirements need to be captured in procurement contracts when these contracts are being issued.
• The commissioning team can help ensure that the right requirements are being captured in each procurement contract.
• The procurement of equipment certainly needs to align with the commissioning sequence to ensure that there is time allowed for proper IFAT and delivery to the site so that all equipment is available when needed for commissioning.  

Integrated Factory Acceptance Testing

• IFAT is a critical step of the Integrated Commissioning Method.
• No longer can factory acceptance testing only verify the hardware. Past projects may have focused only on the hardware testing of electrical equipment – this is no longer sufficient.
• The IFAT must verify both the hardware and the software.
• If IFAT is not properly planned and executed, then any of the issues, design issues, manufacturing issues, and risk are deferred to much later in the project during site commissioning.
• It is very important to have the commissioning team involved during IFAT testing. The commissioning team’s involvement will help them become familiar with the equipment, given that they are the ones that are going to be operating and working with the equipment when it arrives at the site.
• Having the commissioning team’s involvement will guarantee that continuity to ensure any issues identified during IFAT are properly addressed at the site. 

Construction Quality

• It’s important that an industry-leading construction quality management system is implemented on-site to ensure that equipment is installed per contract, and is achieving the necessary quality requirements that the commissioning team will need.
• An integrated construction and commissioning schedule helps to manage all the moving parts of the project and ensure the commissioning team receives each system when required.

Mechanical Completion

• Mechanical completion is the formal handover from the construction team to the commissioning team.
• While the construction team’s attention is on equipment installation, that mindset will shift as we move into commissioning.
• The mechanical completions help to define “systems” of equipment that need to be handed over by the construction team to the commissioning team to proceed with testing. 

Construction Handover and Priorities

• The construction handover and the priorities need to be executed with precision to set the commissioning team up for success.
• On large projects, there are lots of moving parts and lots of handovers of portions of the system.
• This does need to be planned out with precision to ensure that the right systems are available when needed to support the commissioning sequence.
• The commissioning team’s early involvement in the project can help to establish this smooth handover process.

Pre-Commissioning

• After each mechanical completion is when the commissioning team proceeds with pre-commissioning activities
• Since IFAT was complete, the test system was disassembled, everything was packaged up, and shipped to the site. The cubicles were installed on-site in their final site configuration.
• There can be damage during shipping, damage during installation, and the pre-commissioning is a continuation of testing since IFAT to confirm that the cubicles are still functioning as they were in the factory, to confirm that there was no shipping, or installation damage.
• Pre-commissioning is also the first opportunity where the cubicles are integrated with the rest of the equipment on site. The cables, end devices, and the actual real field devices are installed. 
• The first communication checks to all the end devices can be completed during this pre-commissioning phase to ensure that the final site configuration is correct and ready for further commissioning activities. 

Commissioning

• Complex logic functions can now be verified on-site with the real end devices in the field.
• If IFAT was properly planned and executed, then on-site commissioning should go really well.
• If IFAT was not done correctly or was skipped or deferred for whatever reason, then all those issues that would have been found during IFAT are now transferred to critical path on-site activities.

Startup

• Since risks were mitigated during much earlier stages of the project, startup should go smoothly.
• Startup is when the actual process fluids or chemicals or power transfers are initiated for the first time, allowing a lot of the fine-tuning of the plant processes to take place once the systems are up and running.
• Performance verification then proceeds, which is verification that the system in its final configuration is meeting all performance parameters of the contract and ensuring that the owner is receiving a contract compliance system.

Conclusion

• It is imperative to have an integrated approach to commissioning.
• We need to have a new approach to commissioning to ensure that our plant-wide systems are going to function as intended.
• We must de-risk the project much earlier in the process to ensure later commissioning success.
• We need to ensure that software is not an afterthought for development during commissioning, and is developed much earlier in the project process to ensure that it is debugged, accurate, and is going to function correctly to meet the system’s needs during commissioning.

The Integrated Commissioning Method defines that we need to start with the end in mind. We need to have commissioning involved much earlier in the project to ensure that the right decisions are made and that commissioning is going to go smoothly later in the project. We need to involve the commissioning team much earlier in the project. ICM tells us that we need to integrate commissioning into all stages of the project as early as project planning, project procurement, and design phases. 

So, why is ICM different? ICM is the process that has been missing from the industry – to commission your complex systems on-time and on-budget. This process has not existed on a lot of projects. Many projects are still being executed using old methods, and what we need is a structured process to implement and integrate our complex systems. This is what ICM is. We can no longer have commissioning as an ad-hoc process, where commissioning mobilizes at the end of the project. All the commissioning teams are going to be able to do is point out issues, if that is the case. ICM requires that the commissioning team is involved much earlier. 

ICM is the proactive approach to set your commissioning phase of the project up for success. ICM ensures that the project is de-risked appropriately to ensure that commissioning is successful later in the project. Once you understand this process, your commissioning role becomes much easier – it is no longer a scramble.