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EPCOM - Division of Construction Engineering and Management

Dipak Patel

Dipak Patel

Dipak has more than 20 years experience in project controls performing at various levels and capacities across all project phases. He has represented owner and contractor organizations using his diverse planning and scheduling skills. He has developed progress measurement systems for timely and effective reporting of project performance with focus on drill-downs of variances and their impact on cost and schedule. He has contributed to many heavy industrial capital projects across the sectors of power and oil and gas, both international and domestic, in all phases of planning/engineering, EPCM and EPC. He has contributed to companies in developing and their project controls processes, procedures and reporting systems – all with the intent of cost and schedule accuracy. Dipak has been called on to work on poorly performing projects to assist in improving them as well as having worked on the restart of a suspended project toward better pursuit of success.

Specializations and Key Skills

  • Top-down planning and schedule development with logical interdependency
  • Early, accurate schedules during Feasibility, Pre-Feed and FEED with strong progress measurement
  • Developing, implementing and consistently maintaining functionality of engineering, procurement and construction progress measurement
  • Developing, implementing and continuous execution of a performance evaluation system based on earning rules for engineering, procurement and construction (work in progress and accruals)
  • Transparent, effective and timely reporting (specifics/details per need of stakeholder hierarchical order)

Representative Examples of Engagement Experience

  • Developed a schedule management and control system for a large international EPC company as a Lead Planner/Scheduler in the startup of their new office. Worked with engineering to prepare the engineering design workflow standard logic fragnets, budget distribution criteria, interim milestone for earning rules, progress recording and reporting system, and the procedural steps with each associated flow chart. Also, prepared templates for impact analysis, impact category classification, and visual graphic documents and associated presentations.
  • Worked for large EPC Joint Venture on two concurrent projects as project Planner/Scheduler for the construction and startup phases. Created seamless logical interdependent relationships and interim deliverables milestones in Primavera, Level III Integrated Milestone Schedule (IMS) and consistently monitored and reported the probable issues and the likely overruns on time and cost aspects. This detailed, timely reporting also helped initiate trending and the awareness on scope creep. The constant awareness led to prompt actions and the team was able to mitigate 90% of cost/schedule trends (scope creep-induced and others) and were able to deliver both projects on the owner’s schedule and within budget.
  • Worked in a medium-size EPC. In close work with the engineering managers and leads, was able to successfully introduce and implement interim progress status milestones using a stage/gate methodology. The design budget hours distribution and progress measurement rules were set, with stakeholders aligned, to fully resource load the schedule. Developed a progress tracking system by exporting information of status on deliverables from each engineering design discipline. Consistently using this approach and system, the effective reporting of progress and the earned value helped improve project performance and also helped create valuable feedback to the estimating and proposal groups.
  • While working with a major global EPC, on numerous projects, developed a graphical “clothesline and bird philosophical visual/graphical representation” of the Level II schedule comparison report. It illustrated the baseline commitment and the as-built with the remarks on deviations of each interim milestone, important deliverables, contractual obligations/commitments, change order impacts and deviation effect. This report was critical in representing the incident nature and occurrence time and the effect on the overall timeline. Each impact to the project was described and represented with project Primavera schedule fragnets with detailed narrative and impact on time, cost and resource aspect.

Education and Certifications

  • Diploma in Civil Engineering – 1980 – Government Polytechnic (Ahmedabad, India)
  • Microsoft Certified Professional – 2000
  • Sun Certified Java Programmer – 2000