Umut Güdüllüoğlu
Heavy Industries Project, Budget, Planning and Proposal Manager
Nowadays, with the increase and differentiation of risks due to financial uncertainties, preparing proposals and budgets has become a situation that requires more sensitive work and is more critical and important for companies. And experience will be the most important issue in order to overcome these challenges.
What are the main duties and responsibilities in your department? At what stage of major projects, what kind of tasks do you undertake?
As the Proposal, Budget and Planning department, our duties and processes start with the preliminary evaluation of a project that comes to our agenda and after the decision to bid on as a result of this evaluation, we start with the tender documents and the proposal action, and continue with the entire process until the completion of the project.
Our department has 3 main areas of responsibility. We can summarize them as follows:
– Proposal Preparation; the unit where the tender preparation is made. This unit keeps all kinds of up-to-date technical and commercial information and necessary analyzes available in order to bid on, and a tender study is carried out using this information.
– Budget; Our budget unit monitors and controls the cash flow and whether the winning tender continues at the determined costs.
– Planning, Monitoring and Control; whether the won tender continues within the planned time and in accordance with the assigned resources, tracking and control of goals and realizations is also carried out in this unit.
As can be seen from our responsibilities described shortly here, we undertake tasks in the financial and execution processes of projects.
What would the first steps be when it is decided to implement a heavy industry project? Is there a study carried out about your field of duty at this point?
As a first step, handover is made from the proposal unit to the project management unit together with the project management team. During the tender stage, information is provided on the projected risks, cost and duration, and the project management starts preparing a master plan, which will also form the reference bases in terms of cost and duration. Together with our team at all of these stages, we support the generation of plans in all disciplines in coordination with project management.
When the execution phase of the project starts, we take part in more monitoring, control and detection and follow-up of corrective actions, especially on budget and time management issues.
What issues are generally paid attention to in the budgeting phases of heavy industrial projects?
A project can be successful with realistic, open, and competent budget planning and work program follow-up.
There are two important issues that we need to focus on for a successful budget and duration planning. The first one is the accurate costing and the other one is the time management.
Accurate costing is to price all the resources needed by the project in a correct manner with up-to-date analyses and thus to try to minimize the budget deviations that may occur in the future.
On the other hand, time management is the planning and tracking of activities in order not to adversely affect the next step of the items in the project work program.
We can underline the necessity to pay attention to these two main issues even though there are many sub-details in project budgeting studies.
In general, what constitutes the biggest cost burden in a project?
In general, the projects we undertake are turnkey projects. As is known, the entire scope from engineering to procurement, from construction to commissioning is carried out from a single hand in turnkey projects.
The biggest cost item in such comprehensive turnkey projects is the purchase of goods, especially the supply of technological/mechanical equipment.
When a problem occurs with scheduling and planning, how do you generally solve it?
Time is one of the most critical issues in our projects. Even if your project is profitable, time is perhaps the most important promise you make to the investor regarding the project you undertake. It is important that investment be completed at the time you have determined so that the investor can start to get returns of his/her investment as soon as possible.
When each project starts, as the first step, our planning and project monitoring unit makes a business plan for that work together with the project management. This business plan is kind of a road map for that operation. This process is conducted for each project. During the construction process of the work, the business plan is carried out in daily, weekly and monthly periods and using several different methods (critical path analysis, SPI, productivity analysis, etc.) are followed and reported.
When there is any risk of delay with these reports, the necessary units are informed together with the project management about which stage and activity of the project (engineering, manufacturing or construction activities) the delay will occur, and it is tried to help to take precautions beforehand.
What criteria do you set out as an institution during the bidding phase? What are the features that make you differ from your competitors in stages such as offers, tenders, etc.?
Today, the increase and differentiation of risks have begun to necessitate a more accurate and sensitive determination of prices at the bidding stage. In order to achieve the most reasonable offer price under strict competitive conditions and to prepare technical offers suitable for the investor, it is necessary to take into account many criteria.
We can list these as follows:
- Contract Management
- Time Planning
- Cost Estimates
- Budget, Cash Flow Management
- Human Resources Management
- Risk Management
Certainly, many companies take the above listed criteria into account at the proposal stage. The most critical issue here is how experienced you are in these matters. We can say that our experience in this regard provides a great deal of advantage for us. Furthermore, we are trying to develop proactive approaches by using all current and universal instruments of project management in all our projects and we are trying to solve many possible problems by taking precautions before they arise.
How do you participate in the bidding processes of international projects? What kind of a path is followed here, are there any differences?
There are two ways to follow-up the international projects. The first one is that investor companies start to talk to us about their planned investments since we have the advantage of being a well-known contractor in the sector. The other way is that there are regions, countries and projects followed by our friends working on business development. We are trying to closely follow the projects planned to be carried out especially in heavy industry such as cement, energy and iron and steel.
For the international projects, the operations exist in many different countries, in many different currencies, conditions and legislation. Primarily, we try to understand these conditions as clearly as possible. At this point, to talk about the companies in our group; Sintek BV, established in the Netherlands, and Sintek North America, established in the USA, are actively involved in these processes. Although there are processes similar to the ones in many tenders in our country, we may have to evaluate different factors in some elements such as cost, duration and risk for the reasons I have mentioned. In addition, I should point out that the experience brought by doing business an international level beforehand is also an important advantage in this regard. We also take into account our experiences in the projects we have done abroad before at the tender stages.