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Consulting firm optimises project delivery

28th September 2018

     

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Independent advisory and consulting arm of engineering service company WorleyParsons and networking sponsor of this year’s Joburg Indaba, Advisian, is optimising project delivery across Africa.

Advisian provides solutions for clients in the hydrocarbons, minerals and metals, chemicals, and infrastructure industries and has been a sponsor of the Joburg Indaba for the past two years.

Advisian Europe, Middle East and Africa sectors director Adam Boughton tells Mining Weekly that Advisian is helping clients improve their performance by providing solutions to their critical resource, energy and infrastructure challenges. The company achieves this by uniting traditional management and strategic advisory services with deep domain engineering expertise to produce innovative, practical, results-driven solutions.

Boughton collectively refers to this form of solution as “techno-economic modelling analysis”. He explains that this is a solution capable of building a comprehensively sound, optimised business case based on real engineering and technological capabilities, acquired through the organisation’s extensive 130-year project delivery history.

“Advisian’s extensive engineering history has played a fundamental role in much of the organisation’s success, allowing us to develop and plan projects in an efficient, optimal and practical way, resulting in significant customer savings right from the outset,” says Boughton.

Advisian also draws on other unique tools that further assist in mitigating risk and identifying opportunities across their customers’ entire end-to-end business value chain.

These tools include StepWise, which is a fully integrated financial and technical process model that requires minimal financial commitment, and takes a low-risk approach to providing the best possible technical alternatives in a quick and cost-effective way. The model assists in providing strategic decisions on potential investments, with a focus on maximising returns while minimising and managing exposure to risk. Risks and opportunities are identified early on in the process, thereby offering real value choices quickly and at a very low cost.

“Through StepWise, Advisian can also create a digital model of any potential project and can technically simulate its operation. This gives a visual representation of the final development and can significantly reduce the cost of prefeasibility studies or lead a project immediately to feasibility stage,” explains Boughton.

In addition, access to WorleyParsons’ extensive real-world database on project delivery and engineering knowledge assists in the early identification of options, thereby reducing operating expense and capital expenditure.

Further aiding the process of bringing projects to the market in the most sustainable, optimised way is Advisian’s environmental management, social performance and stakeholder management capabilities. Boughton states that from changing local, national and international legislation, to increasing stakeholder and community expectations, Advisian helps customers understand and manage their interfaces with the natural, physical, social, cultural, regulatory and built environments – irrespective of which part of the world they are operating in.

He emphasises that the organisation’s strong engineering and consultancy capabilities in South Africa have played an integral role in acquiring projects throughout the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.

A key example is the power sector, according to Boughton.

“We have achieved success in Africa with [several] projects under way. Among the projects in which we are currently engaged locally is a project to provide biogas from biomass sources, and we are also assisting various companies in accessing the viability of developing a gas economy in South Africa,” he says.

The advisory business was also appointed as owner’s engineer for the concentrated solar power fourth phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, in Dubai, the largest of its kind in the world, in July. Challenges that the organisation has been asked to address include the size of the plant; managing technology risk, particularly in the central tower plant, including the receiver and surrounding heliostat fields; and in the very large thermal energy storage systems.

“Sustainable, optimised projects rely on strong technical engineering experience, sound financial advice and responsible social and environmental capabilities; all of which is offered through Advisian’s comprehensive suite of advisory services,” adds Boughton.

He concludes that “WorleyParsons is a company that prides itself on providing safe and high-quality services that exceed its customer’s expectations, which is why it manages some of the world’s leading projects”.

Edited by Mia Breytenbach
Creamer Media Deputy Editor: Features

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