AREVA, the global leader in nuclear energy, provides products and services to ensure nuclear reactor performance and safety through every stage of the fuel cycle.
AREVA is also a major player in renewable energies, providing advanced technology solutions for offshore wind, bioenergy, concentrated solar power and energy storage. The combination of offerings contributes synergistically to a reliable, economical and low-carbon energy mix.
In the United States, AREVA Inc. anticipated a number of large and concurrent projects on the horizon and embarked on an initiative to improve project certainty across their project portfolios. Recognizing projects that range in value from $100K to many billions require different levels of project management rigor, the team established scalable Earned Value Management (EVM) processes that adjust according to project complexity. As an industry best practice, EVM techniques provide an early warning system for monitoring project performance and anticipating overruns.
After developing an EVM system description, AREVA turned its focus to implementing a software system that aligned with AREVA’s established standards. AREVA implemented the Sequence
Enterprise Project Performance platform for controlling one of AREVA’s largest engineering services projects. After a successful deployment, the U.S. project management organization (PMO) selected Sequence Enterprise as its recommended enterprise standard for project controls and EVM. Key differentiators of Sequence Enterprise are its breadth and depth of project controls capabilities, robust interfaces and ease-of-use.
Based on AREVA’s experience with Sequence Enterprise key business stakeholders are now looking at expanding the use of Sequence Enterprise to include project opportunity management and resource supply/demand planning.
Objectives
Leverage Sequence Enterprise to broaden EVM best practices for a wide range of projects
Institute a culture of proactive project management through processes and tools
Establish a single system to support AREVA’s project EVM standards
Cover a range of project types and sizes and including full support for EIA-748 EVM projects
Give users an easy-to-use EVMS that eliminates the need for static spreadsheets and manual reporting processes
Provide seamless cost/schedule integration between Sequence Enterprise SAP and Primavera P6
Support the mantra “enter data one time, in the appropriate system, at the right step”
Solutions
Implementation of Sequence Enterprise for estimation and bid pricing, contract work authorization, project performance management and baseline change management
Performance analysis through both weekly progress monitoring by AREVA project controls teams and monthly performance reports for customers
Bi-directional integration between Sequence Enterprise and SAP that synchronizes WBS, actual expenditures, purchase requisitions, purchase orders and budgets between the systems
Schedule and progress integration with Oracle Primavera P6 for use in performance management and reporting
An integrated baseline change request (BCR) process that integrates with the schedule and prices and burdens costs based on rates
A contract budget base (CBB) log that integrates through workflow with contract work authorization (CWA), work authorization requests (WAR) and control account work authorization (CAWA) processes
Benefits
AREVA has been able to systematize advanced EVM practices that were previously applied to the most complex projects in order to elevate the project management maturity for a broader range of projects
Sequence Enterprise has created visibility into the importance of project data quality and the value added by mature project management practices
The automated integration of systems has created tremendous time-savings for analysts, who can focus attention on high value tasks like performance analysis, forecasting and trend management
Sequence Enterprise’s ease-of-use has enabled a broader group of users to embrace EVM practices
The ability to tailor Sequence Enterprise’s configuration to support AREVA’s specific business rules and processes gave AREVA the flexibility of implementing a system that didn’t dictate or restrict the business process
