One of the reasons I love food and beverage projects is the kind of challenge they offer. They are demanding and rewarding jobs to work on – and none more so than when they take place on an operational site.
Disruption to the client’s core business is a serious risk on these projects. In my view, our success over the years comes down to two things: experience and planning. We can work confidently with knowledge gained from over three decades of experience, but that only really counts if the job’s been set up properly so it doesn’t get in the way of the business happening around it.
It’s important to manage the project from an overall perspective. Too often we see project teams running towards the first hurdle on a project as hard as they can, whereas they should start by understanding how this hurdle connects with all the others on the racetrack. Most construction projects are a long run with a succession of interlinked tasks and objectives. What’s more, flogging the project team to achieve a milestone which has minimal impact on the critical path of the project is a sure-fire way to demotivate them.
I visited a site some time ago where a client had pushed ahead with a project to expand a process floor area with a new mezzanine. This would give them extra floor space to handle packaging above the congested and wet process area. If you asked me what a job like this typically calls for in the planning stage, I’d suggest 4 requirements straight away:
- Continuous production during the works
- Safe personnel movement
- Functional services (lighting, fire detection, electrical connections, etc)
- The ability to load pallets with packaging materials
Unfortunately though, none of those had been addressed before things started moving. The preoccupation with that first hurdle – the floor space itself – had taken over. A steel structure had been started, with columns and main beams in place, but not much else. The team were struggling to fit access stairs amongst the lines, they were unsure how to form and pour the slab without a week-long shutdown, and there wasn’t enough room to safely handle pallets onto the mezzanine. The sad part was that all of these problems could have simply existed on paper – but they had become physically housed within the constraints of an existing primary steel structure.
It was really frustrating to see a project turn into a headache when all it needed was a proper planning phase. For whatever results you might get by tackling a project head-on, you’re relying on luck and you’re leaving yourself wide open to failure.
To help you approach your next ‘brownfield’ project, check out our online case study which looks at a few challenges that often arise on these jobs. If you’d like a more specific idea of what to consider, we are always happy to discuss your upcoming projects and offer some obligation-free advice on managing project risks.
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