Engineers India Ltd. (EIL), a leading design and engineering organization in South Asia with decades of experience in the oil & gas sector, was the engineering, procurement, and construction management consultant for this project. The IOCL project management office inducted experienced engineers to exclusively handle the butadiene plant project. Identification of critical milestones, estimates from feasibility studies, time-bound closures, maximum use of existing facilities, and reusable assets were a few approaches IOCL adopted for effective change management. The teams made extensive use of project management tools like Oracle Primavera to schedule, monitor, and control the project. The teams worked in close co-ordination, back calculated the completion time of activities, put in additional resources when required and prepared catch up plans. They conducted brainstorming sessions, audits, shop floor visits, and monthly, weekly, and daily review meetings with site and construction contractors, suppliers, and vendors to monitor and control progress. Butadiene experts helped train existing IOCL engineers and carried out hazard and safety operations by installing a special chemical cleaning procedure and an innovative technique to ensure leak proof operations.
Instead of purchasing all the required equipment, the team camped at the project site for 20 days and re-engineered processes. One such innovation is to use existing transfer pumps to operate in dual mode – one for storage and transfer to SBR plant, and the other for storage and transfer to the loading gantry for direct merchant sale of butadiene. The project was completed with no rework, or cost and time overruns, and adhered to quality assurances plans and standards, leading to an accident-free 20 lakh human hours. IOCL's adoption of innovative construction techniques, mature project management processes, and the integration and synchronization of inter and intra personnel tasks led to the success of the project. Mr. Narinder Kumar, executive director (project), IOCL, states, "The butadiene extraction unit project has set high standards in project management. It is a matter of honor for us that the project has won PMI India Best Project of the Year award under the medium sized projects category. Congratulations to the entire project team for the spectacular performance."