Commissioning is the most important phase of your project, it is what determines if everything you’ve done prior to commissioning during the procurement, design, and construction phases was successful. But most projects do not approach commissioning this way, everyone is stuck in beginner mode and leaving commissioning to later to in the project. There is a better way to approach commissioning with a more sophisticated approach to protect your project investment.

There are two aspects of industrial process commissioning to consider:

• Planning for commissioning
• Execution of on-site testing

Most people don’t like paperwork, so it’s understandable that people avoid planning and want to focus on the fun-stuff – hands-on commissioning in the field.

However, the success of the commissioning phase of your project is not determined by your on-site testing. The success of your commissioning is determined by everything that takes place prior to on-site testing. The decisions that are made and the actions that are taken during the procurement, design, and construction phases of your project will determine how well your commissioning goes.

Procurement

You see, your project needs to be set up for success right from the beginning. Start with the end in mind when preparing contract documents and when selecting design and installation groups. You cannot out-commission a bad contract or unqualified project participants. Poorly defined contract documents always lead to disputes during off-site FAT and on-site testing while everyone argues about what needs to be tested rather than getting the job done on-time.

This is why it is critical to have commissioning input to procurement processes early in your project, to make sure that all the gaps are closed, and everything is defined upfront. This is very possible, even in the absence of all the design details.

Too often, projects have a clear start, but have no clearly defined finish.  This is not a good way to start projects – to open the bank and start paying huge invoices, but have no idea how the project will end and how the spending will stop. With properly defined contract documents at the beginning of your project, you are already on a better path to successfully completing your project.

Think of projects like a large firehose – your project will start and money will start to be spent. Eventually, the firehose of money being paid each month is enormous, each month more money is going out the door. This is to be expected for a period of time, but eventually, you need a way to shut off the hose and stop the flow of money. That is only done by successfully completing commissioning and completing your project. But too many projects are started and have no clear plan for how to shut off the firehose of money. When the project was started, commissioning was an afterthought to be figured out later. Well, this is scary, that the firehose of money is allowed to be turned on with no upfront and clear plan for how it will be shut off. It’s no wonder the firehose keeps pumping out money as your project scrambles to try to figure out how to shut it off during commissioning. Wouldn’t a better approach be to do the upfront work to define commissioning during procurement, so that everyone is clear on how the project will end during commissioning? 

Design

The decisions made during design activities will determine the success of commissioning. There is an inherent disconnect between the design engineers working from the head office and the actual site implementation of the intended design. It is important to bridge this gap by having commissioning involved early in your project to provide feedback from the end of the project (commissioning) to earlier in the project (design). Having this feedback loop allows better decisions to be made during design that can greatly improve the success of commissioning. When designs are allowed to be completed in isolation, any design errors are deferred to later in the project for the commissioning team to resolve. Or worse, what was designed cannot actually be installed and operated in the field.  This is often referred to as a constructability review, but there is important operability feedback to be included as well.  By the time issues are identified in the field after installation, the designers have moved on to their next project, and all the commissioning team can do is identify errors.

The sequence of design activities must also be completed in the same order as the startup sequence. There is no reason to complete the chemical dosing system design first if it is the last system in the startup sequence. The commissioning team must prepare the commissioning and startup sequence required to achieve the project in-service date well in advance to guide all groups on the sequence and priorities of activities. Without this, design and construction packages will be out of sequence from startup, causing delays as subsystem inter-dependencies are not aligned.

Closing the loop and allowing commissioning feedback into the design phase greatly increases your project’s chance of success.

Construction

The integration between construction quality management and commissioning needs special attention. This is the most complex transition in projects, and the details matter. This transition needs to be meticulously planned well in advance so that there are no surprises. For example, there are multiple subsystems on projects and several questions to answer – when is each one required to be complete, in what order are they required to be completed, and what is the detailed definition of complete? I have seen too often that everyone’s definition of complete means something different. The contractor’s definition of complete means something completely different than the commissioning team’s definition of complete. And the contract doesn’t have the level of detail required to clarify what complete means and how this transition from construction to commissioning takes place (see the procurement section above, and contracts missing details).

To address this,  the industry-best construction quality management processes are required, with a dedicated quality management team to ensure that the contractual quality requirements are met to ensure the commissioning team receives what they need. Trying to save money with minimal quality oversight always costs more money in the end as issues are deferred to commissioning, causing costly delays. Ensuring that properly structured construction quality processes are planned for is critical to the success of the commissioning phase of your project.

Commissioning

Everything up to this point is required prior to on-site commissioning. Skip any of the previous steps, or do any of the previous steps poorly, and the commissioning phase of your project will not go well. It doesn’t matter if you have the best commissioning team and the best procedures for testing, nothing will go well if the previous phases of your project were done poorly.

This too often gets missed. You may have a spectacular commissioning team who can make miracles happen every day – they are the best at testing in the field, have started up hundreds of systems in the past, and can recite the entire Fibonacci sequence in their sleep. But they will not be able to work their magic if none of the previous phases of your project were properly planned.

If your commissioning team is receiving a steaming pile of garbage that was poorly installed and is riddled with design errors, then there is not much they can do except plow through the issues and try to sort out the mess. All the magic of commissioning is lost due to poor planning during previous phases.

Back to a statement earlier in this article – nobody likes the paperwork and everyone wants to focus on the sexy part of the project – the hands-on testing in the field. But by focusing only on the execution of testing, you’re missing the most important part of the commissioning process. On-site testing is only one stage of the commissioning process, and all preceding stages of the commissioning process are what will determine if your on-site testing is successful. Following a structured commissioning process starting early in your project is what will determine the success of your project. Avoid earlier stages of the commissioning process and leave it as an after-thought, and your project is already on a path to failure.

Learn how to properly plan and execute all stages of commissioning and what takes place during each stage at www.CommissioningAndStartup.com. You can get started for free with our free 3-Day Mini-Course.