Project Production Management Journey

[00:00:00] Roberto J. Arbulu: Well, first of all, welcome, Al and Syed. Can you hear me?

[00:00:09] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Hello, Roberto. Roberto, yes, very clearly.

[00:00:13] Roberto J. Arbulu: Excellent. Thank you. I can see you and hear you well. Great. I know it’s getting really late in Malaysia, so I need to say that we really thank you for staying up that late. It’s probably, I don’t know, two in the morning for you.

[00:00:29] Roberto J. Arbulu: Thank you for participating in this symposium today. It’s a very important session. The one we are going to have today with Petronas is important because they bring their vision for the project management of the future. They will take us through that story and how Petronas has actively set that vision and how they have identified project production management as part of that vision, and also, as an enabler of modernization.

[00:00:59] Roberto J. Arbulu: So, but before we get going, let me introduce Al and Syed. So, Al-Azahary is currently leading a team to drive transformation in PETRONAS Group Project Delivery. He has seventeen years of working experience in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry. He was involved in plant operations and maintenance before assuming a project manager role overseeing various plant change and rejuvenation projects.

[00:01:32] Roberto J. Arbulu: He is currently spearheading Project Production Management (PPM) implementation within PETRONAS projects, and also playing the role to shape Malaysia’s oil & gas industry players to adopt the methodology for improved project probability performance. This is, by the way, Al, a very important point. Maybe you can expand later on in your presentation, what you’re doing with the local industry there.

[00:01:55] Roberto J. Arbulu: Al holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and a Master’s degree in Process Plant Management from University of Technology Malaysia. Welcome. Also, this allows me to introduce  Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali, Syed is currently Principal for Construction & Decommissioning Delivery at Petronas. He has almost 30 years of experience in construction management in various sectors including oil & gas, refinery, petrochemical and power plants.

[00:02:27] Roberto J. Arbulu: He joined Petronas about 20 years ago in 2001, during a JV with DOW chemicals in petrochemical plant construction, maintenance and operation. He has had various involvement in construction including as a contractor, sub-contractor, third-party, and he has a diploma in Marine Engineering from Ungku Omar Polytechnic University in Malaysia.

[00:02:52] Roberto J. Arbulu: Once again, welcome to both of you. And that being said, I’m going to stop sharing my screen so you can share yours – over to you.

[00:03:03] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Thank you, Roberto. And so far you can hear me clearly, Roberto.

[00:03:12] Roberto J. Arbulu: Oh, we can hear you very well, Syed. Thank you. Okay. The content as well.

[00:03:17] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Okay. I wish a good afternoon to all the respected delegates or participants of PPI’s Annual Symposium 2021.

[00:03:34] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Syed Ab Razak. I’m a principle construction from Petronas, which is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I am proud to announce together with me is my partner, Mr. Al Azahari, who holds the position  of head of construction-based engineering in the project management of future departments.

[00:04:10] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Can you move to the next slide, Al? All right. Okay. Thank you, Al,

[00:04:19] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Do you mind? No, us to the F1 race and we are proud to be associated with the winning team. Beside that, the desire to confuse newly improved as applied in the formula one risk, actually also being a culture in our project delivery effort. Although we can see a quite good outcome from our IP benchmarking.

[00:04:54] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: But yet we are still concerned with the fact that somehow our project is still facing a delay. We need management intervention, a deep dive rescue which leads to the catch up plans for recovery and especially in major Capital Project. Recently we have a COVID-19 pandemic. Like others.

[00:05:30] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: We also faced an unprecedented challenge to manage the detrimental impact to our project execution and keep on finding the best.

[00:05:50] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: So, and speed towards sustainable project delivery performance. And to put on our specific effort that leads to project production management in Petronas, I would like to hand it over to my partner Al-Azahary for the next slide. Position over that to you, Al.

[00:06:20] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Thank you very much, Syed. Thank you Roberto. I’m very honored to be with the audience in this symposium today.

[00:06:31] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: And I will start with sharing on the project management of the future, despite our transformation, transformation effort in Petronas in our group project delivery. We initiated the project management of the future initiative just recently starting last year. And it consists of four transformative areas, four ports to cover improvement in the first digital ecosystem, and second on execution methodology.

[00:07:05] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: The third on utilization of smart devices and on looking for other breakthrough solutions within project delivery space. But the core engine of the transformation is the construction based engineer. Which focuses on process improvement with enabling technologies to support the improvement. Right. And we have strategically selected two of the industry’s best practice methodologies to be implemented and focused to be for adoption, which is the first, the IT AWP, advanced packaging, and second, the project production management.

[00:07:51] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: All right. I’m going to share a little bit more on our reflections on our 12 months PPM journey and outlook moving forward. We began our journey in PPM just about a year ago after the finalization of the team of Blue. At first, we collaborated with McKenzie in the early stage for initial capability building.

[00:08:17] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Which involved key project leaders and executives, and we built up the momentum from there. And as we focus the plan towards actual PPM implementation in pilot projects, we acknowledge the importance of synchronization between, first, the solution providers. Second, our partners and our contractors, and third, our own internal project management team as our own operators work together in the effort to ensure successful implementation that really delivers value.

[00:08:56] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Right? And therefore, with that, in 10, we established a joint industry collaboration, which we kicked off much earlier in June of this year, and involved our partners, our contractors, as well as our solution providers to shape the industry players towards adoption of PPM, and in Q3, we started with

[00:09:33] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Strategy Project Solutions, SPS, for proof of concept implementation in projects. Since then we started our steep learning curve, and now are still in active concurrent implementation of PPM in various projects. We are still exploring PPM through this exercise. We are learning by doing and improving our understanding of the methodology while assessing the opportunity to scale up the adoption to wider project scopes.

[00:10:09] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Alright, instead of focusing on a few specific projects for pilot implementation, we have selected a slightly more challenging route. We are currently deploying our PPM proof of concept in multiple projects concurrently. Therefore, more effort is required to engage HPMT with its unique characteristic here.

[00:10:33] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Projects different in terms of geography, some projects offshore, some onshore. There are upstream and downstream projects involved. Some downstream or some greenfield and some brownfield, as well as some major and minor projects and minor CapEx, right? And implementation is focused to select activities and milestones with each proof of concept project focusing on various phases for PPM, either within basic or detail engineering, design in construction, as well as commissioning phases.

[00:11:13] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: And due to COVID-19 logistics challenges. As of now, the technical support from our solution provider, SPS, is fully done remotely. Although the PMTs definitely prefer to have physical support at project sites that would further improve the effectiveness of the PPM deployment.

[00:11:33] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Although we are still pretty much in the middle of the PPM proof of concept implementation, we could already see positive impacts in the few projects involved. We have seen specific milestones in the project able to be completed ahead of schedule, although not much about six days of schedule, but considering the short implementation.

[00:12:01] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Specific milestones at the critical final part of the project, it is still considered as a magnificent achievement. Right? And for some other projects, feedback we received post that project is teams could appreciate the benefit they got from PSO and PPC application. The clarity gained on the overall production system enabled the team to align detail, plan, detail, plan properly, proactively mitigate issues before it happens and even in recovery mode.

[00:12:39] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: The insights are useful to indicate whether the situations are getting better or getting much worse so that the right patient could be taken properly to improve it.

[00:12:52] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Definitely to introduce something new and challenge the norm. It’s not so easy. So in our PPM journey in Petronas, these are three of the most significant challenges we experience so far. First challenge in data gathering is to map and model the production system. What we experience is that this requires a lot of effort and time consuming data availability and accuracy.

[00:13:20] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: To be included in the model is one method to be aware of as well. Especially when engineering and construction planning is still at an early stage. Maybe it is desirable if we could develop the model based on an established template instead of building from scratch, maybe we could explore the possibility to collaborate with the PPM community, other PPM practitioners.

[00:13:49] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: To share and exchange data on production system models and standard processes for mutual benefit in PPM adoption. The second challenge is knowledge and the capability to understand new terminologies and shift the project team’s perspective from the current conventional methodology mindset.

[00:14:14] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: And we believe more interactive training and education material is required to facilitate awareness and understanding on PPM methodology. And we are also working towards improving in this area by creating more

[00:14:37] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: awareness material that is easy to understand. And the challenge, and this is considered a given challenge for any transformation effort, is commitment by the project team and the reception to embrace the change. And for this, we believe a deeper look on the change management approach needs to be considered for effective deployment of PPM solutions in any projects.

[00:15:04] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: And we are actually trying to find the best recipe for us to minimize the resistance to adopting the project.

[00:15:24] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: So I’ve covered my part on my, on our PPM, Petronas. So now I pass it back to you for our conclusion. Over to you, Syed.

[00:15:34] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Thank you, Al. Thank you, Al, for covering the journey, and I will say it’s a very compressed explanation briefly. And of course when we talk about Janine, we don’t forget the challenges in our PPM implementation.

[00:15:52] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: POC. Okay. Referring to the proof of concept there is a question. There’s a question whether the PPM concept is really proven. So through our journey, we have three word digs as our condition for this question. Okay the first, we say that PPM enables new and detailed insight that was previously unable to be assessed with the convention method.

[00:16:28] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Here we observe that a variable insight generated from the PPM Analytic are leading indicators of the project HSS, such as aerodynamic resource planning, adequacy team, individual commitment and reliability. Optimum work-in-process level as well as sources of the variability. Okay. Alright, the next slide.

[00:17:00] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: So on the second we project an exploration system, bring a crystal— I always say crystal clear line of sight on workflow and interfaces. How we get into this is through, first is to identify and map standard work and capture SPS solutions and develop production schedules that integrate multiple standard processors, including crew and equipment allocations.

[00:17:40] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Minimize variability and reduce what is in process through daily production planning. And last, improve with execution through the production based analytic. Okay. On our next verdicts,

[00:18:02] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: understanding inter-relationship awareness elements in PPM enable products and to recover and improve project delivery performance. For example, in the through case, at a certain stage, we may not be able to change on product design anymore, but there still is still an opportunity in plan and control and process design.

[00:18:33] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Do more with the limited resources, control the V in order to improve cycle time. And lastly, detect and eliminate the source of the variabilities.

[00:18:51] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: So ladies and gentlemen, that’s all from us who are relatively new in the PPM implementation. We are truly honored to be given this opportunity to share our journey in this symposium and we are looking forward to learning from other members and as well PPM practitioners around the globe. Let’s strive for modern construction.

[00:19:28] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Thank you very much. And Roberto, as we see Emily. Okay, what does it mean? Thank you.

[00:19:38] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay. learning something. Thank you so much to both of you. Very impressive. And, I think we have 10 minutes, so we’re going to go to some questions and if we have people from the audience with specific questions for our friends from, please feel free to use the Q&A.

[00:19:57] Roberto J. Arbulu: But, maybe a few things to highlight, Al,and Syed. The first one is, it’s about the predicted management of the future, right? And the first question is, so can you elaborate a bit more, you know, on what has been the main driver behind Petronas establishing this vision? Because you as a company, you are moving somewhere, right?

[00:20:23] Roberto J. Arbulu: You have already said direction, and you are also working with the local construction industry in Malaysia to be involved in your vision, so you can actually establish a working partnership to become better. Right. So can you please say more about the main drivers behind your management of the future?

[00:20:48] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: In Petronas, we introduce the aspiration of moving forward together. MFT fifth 50. Apart from achieving net zero carbon by 2050, we have an ambitious target to achieve 50% improvement in terms of cash generation within five years, right? And 50% improvement in terms of non-traditional revenue.

[00:21:29] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: So we are expecting a lot more projects going on and definitely with the current method of project delivery, right? And the unsustainable practice of project execution. Right. We foresee that we won’t be able to achieve our aspiration with our current way of working. That’s why the management embarked on project management of the future, focusing on what is the best practice or best practices in global methodologies, not only on

[00:22:20] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: focusing on digitalization or utilizing the fancy technologies, but we need to also ensure that the methodology is correct for us, and use technology to enable the right methodology. So that is pretty much the background on project management of the future.

[00:22:44] Roberto J. Arbulu: Thank you so much, Al, we do have a couple questions here.

[00:22:49] Roberto J. Arbulu: I’m going to connect these two questions purposely because they are certainly related, so bear with me on this. So one of the questions is, what role are the most senior executives at Petronas playing in driving this proof of concept effort? Right? So there’s a question about the senior executive.

[00:23:11] Roberto J. Arbulu: There’s another question about how do you get patronist management and middle managers to accept testing? Project production management, what motivated them to make a change to project production management? As you can see, these two questions are a bit different, but very related. So what, what can you say about that?

[00:23:33] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Thank you for the question. Very good question. And regarding the top management’s involvement or role in this project? Production management, or transformation journey, for example, in the joint industry collaboration, our vice president actually plays the critical role of getting the industry to be together with us, right,

[00:24:10] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: to influence the other colleagues of top management from our partners, our contractors, as well as solution providers. And also champion the program internally, within Petronas. Right? So the role of champion, the effort is very critical, and still, with our current setup, the role of vice president and the top leadership is to drive the other project leaders right at project level or project manager level.

[00:25:11] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: To embrace the change is very much crucial because the tendency is that

[00:25:19] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: project teams tend to prefer to do things the way they do. Right? And

[00:25:33] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: trying something new is not something that is preferable because of their current commitment  as well. Right? Right. But because of the drive by the top leaders, this gets moving and we hope to build the momentum through education and capability building as well.

[00:26:01] Roberto J. Arbulu: Excellent. So there’s clear support from the top management on the direction and setting the vision for project management of the project. That you have multiple components, right? There are a couple of questions, I believe two or three questions related to— let me read one of them because I think the other two are sort of similar.

[00:26:20] Roberto J. Arbulu: It says one of your slides shows PPM and a WIP. Did you look into both? Did you select one or both? So it seems that there’s another question associated with that as well. You know, any conflicts between PPM and AWP, so perhaps you can expand a bit more about it.

[00:26:43] Roberto J. Arbulu: Actually,

[00:26:43] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: we are also exploring both methods, right? As of now, we have yet to implement both in any projects, but we try to implement different methods at different projects or maybe Syed can explain for that.

[00:27:04] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: Yeah. Yeah. I think to me, if I can answer that correctly, between the AAP and PM through the, our PM both complement each other.

[00:27:19] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: So it is about packaging the project itself and the PPM is another methodology in which we focus on productivity. So I mean, we need to appreciate both methodologies. Okay? And at the moment we are still in the midst of exploring both energy and could be going to hybrid.

[00:27:54] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: I think it depends on what the outcome after we complete this exercise. Excellent.

[00:28:02] Roberto J. Arbulu: So thank you, thank you for your answers to these questions. And one thing that at least to me is clear is that you mentioned this, you just started that journey, right? And there’s, there’s many more things to come and

[00:28:22] Roberto J. Arbulu: we certainly welcome your participation in future events. You can continue sharing what you’re doing, what you’re getting out of that, and how that contributes to changing the way Petronas delivers capital projects. And also by doing that, how you influence the industry locally and also internationally because you, you do.

[00:28:47] Roberto J. Arbulu: Service providers that are global companies. Right. And there was actually one question here, which is an interesting one, and maybe you can say very, very quickly, right? 30 seconds. What did you learn from the Formula One experience and what you are bringing to your project?

[00:29:13] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: If I can answer, Roberto,  very quickly. How we improve at the pit stop. I believe that we can improve a lot. So this one here, we can also apply it to as well as the continuous improvement.

[00:29:42] Syed Ab Razak Bin Sy Ali: So which area? And then we see that focus at the  pit stop. It gives a lot of benefit to the whole of the risk – just one, one small portion.

[00:29:56] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: Okay. For me, it is simple. It is the production system right in Formula One or in the projects. It is viewing it as a production system, and we can, once we really understand the production system, there are all the opportunities for us to improve.

[00:30:19] M Al-Azahary B A Sani: All right. Thank you, brother.

[00:30:20] Roberto J. Arbulu: Excellent. So, basically looking at the pit stop is the inspiration and looking at that as a production system. That’s great. That has a lot of similarities also with what we heard from Hez on the previous presentation. So conscious of time. Thank you very much, Al and and Syed, for your participation and your story.

[00:30:42] Roberto J. Arbulu: Very impressive and we really all wish you guys slack on the journey that continues, right? It’s just the beginning, so thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it. On behalf of PPI.