equipment procurement | industrial projects The Challenges of Equipment Procurement in Industrial Projects by Lara Al Amm, Senior Project Engineer Industrial projects are widely executed through Engineering, Procurement and Construction or Turnkey arrangements, when a plant is designed and built by the contractor and turned over to the client in a ready-to-operate condition. In some instances, especially when design necessitates a particular expertise or knowledge of a specific production process, industrial projects are executed through a conventional Design-and-Build arrangement when the design consultant and the construction contractor are two distinct entities. This arrangement commonly brings to the clients the duty to procure themselves the project’s main equipment and materials and often times the client delegates this duty to the design consultant. Those equipment and materials are usually long lead items with a high degree of customization, quite specialized, and constitute an important share of the total project cost which triggers more interest in conducting competitive procurement for individual equipment or equipment package and ensuring timely availability on site for installation. The fact that the design consultant typically needs very specific data from equipment suppliers in order to complete its design encourages separate and early procurement of equipment. This equipment procurement duty delegated to the design consultant exposes it to major challenges especially that most industrial projects have very strict time constraints and critical interfaces with on-going operations and processes. Delays in procurement could mean delays in the start of operation or production thus translate into measurable losses in market shares — employer-caused delays that the contractor could claim for time extensions and cost reimbursements. 7