EPC sector Digital Transformation journey between reality and illusion
Published on 06 Feb 2018
The knowing-doing gap is a perfect illustration of the many challenges that EPC are facing with their attempts to digitalise and transform their business / projects over the last seven years.
Before we explain LeadVision's major milestone to decrypt this puzzle, we need to shed some light on the root cause of the problem.
We can start by asking ourselves, is it an objective for solution providers to offer a true turn key solution to revolutionise these sectors? Let’s analyse the current state.
It’s all about time, cost, and maturity. Most of tier one solution providers themselves have evolved over time, meaning they started as a database company, or scheduling and planning, or maintenance solutions in some cases.
Then, their journey started with acquisitions to expand their portfolio, complementing current limitations to fulfil their gaps, which is a good effort; however, there were no genuine attempts to review, consolidate and integrate whatever they had acquired overtime and establish a true turnkey solution for their clients in this industry, but why?
It’s a lengthy and expensive process, and if you are a “Solutions Provider” public company, it’s not a priority. So the solution providers decide to leave the EPC industry to deal with it on their own, and at the same time it becomes another ongoing source of revenue for solutions provider. We have tried to provide an example as a good visual illustration as to what is happening.
- EPC is a “client” trying to buy a solution. We will call this solution a “car." The car dealer shows you a picture of this car in a catalogue PowerPoint, and after deciding you like it, you choose to buy it.
- The vendor (solution providers) comes out of the show room with several boxes of the car parts in a perfect condition, then the client (EPC) asks the vendors how to use them. The vendors reply with, "we can assemble them for you (integrate them for you)".
- The client (EPC) was expecting, when they ordered the car (Solution) that they saw in the picture PowerPoint, it would be as easy as taking the car keys and going for a drive, maybe making some minor changes that meets their exact needs and comfort, but not to build, integrate, and assemble the car before you drive it.
This is exactly what is happening in this important sector. Solution providers show the picture of the car (solution) that is not yet assembled or integrated and sell it like it’s all part of a single solution platform that is fully integrated. They then expect each client to pay additional costs, or to handle their own integration and carry the risks.
LeadVision claims to have a game changer in the EPC sector with EOMS+IPM, because we have built our solutions from the ground up, fully integrated with all the processes embedded, to align and meet the industry’s best practice out of the box. Our objective was to decrypt this puzzle and enable a true turn key solution to transform the EPC sector end – end.
We have analysed ongoing EPC gaps and challenges, by introducing iPM to current EPC with existing solutions to secure their existing investments and building on it to better leverage and complement their gaps, to manage their business and projects end to end from one single source of truth (Platform).
iPM `works as a bridge between ERP, isolated planning tool, Doc Management and budget management, to ensure we leverage such investment and digitalise it further with greater maturity, and a smarter layer on the top that brings it together with world-class project control, fully aligned to PMBOK with a touch of AI.
Now EPC can truly achieve what they have been hoping to achieve from their solution providers for many years without luck.
EPC needs to push back and raise the bar if they want to be taken seriously and stop being abused by solution providers. They need to demand true innovation that meets their business needs faster, cost effectively, with our out of the box solution meeting the 80/20 rule.
