Commissioning is a fundamental process of industrial plant process and energy system projects in order for projects to succeed, yet commissioning is not well understood by all groups working on projects. Too often the commissioning process is confused with testing, and only on-site testing activities are considered at the end of projects. This is one of the contributing factors to 9 out of 10 projects ending up late and over-budget.
If you have ever searched for commissioning guidance, a standard to follow, or a proven roadmap for commissioning success, you’ve likely found bits and pieces of information. Some of the existing standards apply to HVAC commissioning, but don’t cover the more complex aspects of process and energy system commissioning. Some of the standards cover part of the commissioning process, but don’t define the upfront commissioning inputs required during FEED and procurement. In the absence of a comprehensive commissioning standard to follow, big multi-national companies have developed their own internal commissioning processes. And if you’ve ever worked on one of these really big projects, they have well defined commissioning processes to provide guidance on commissioning best-practices.
But what this has led to is a very disjointed industry. When each company and each project follows a different variation of the commissioning process, there has been no standard approach to commissioning. When people transition from one project to another, the commissioning process varies, and they have to adapt to a slightly different approach to commissioning each time. When everyone joining a project has a different understanding of what commissioning is really all about, this makes it very difficult, and each project team has to re-establish what commissioning is, has to re-learn the commissioning terminology specific to each project, and has to re-invent the wheel each project to determine the commissioning process to follow.
As well, mid-size and smaller-sized companies that don’t have the internal resources to develop their own internal commissioning best practices have had nothing to follow. They may model bits and pieces of standards they have found, but are missing sufficient guidance on best-practices required to successfully complete project commissioning. With this gap in information, it’s not anyone’s fault that commissioning has not been well understood on projects.
The Industrial Commissioning Association is bridging this gap by developing the ICA Global Commissioning Standard. This will be the most comprehensive guidance on commissioning best-practices, that covers the entire project delivery lifecycle from project concept all the way to project in-service, and what aspects of the commissioning process are required during each stage of projects to ensure project success.
The ICA Global Commissioning Standard is current written, and consists of the following set of documents:
- ICA-001 Global Commissioning Standard
- ICA-002 Terminology
- ICA-003 Roles & Responsibilities
- ICA-004 Phases, Milestones, & Methodology
- ICA-005 Safety & Risk Management
- ICA-006 Lessons Learned & Continuous Improvement
This sent of documents is currently under review by about 20 commissioning experts from all over the world from all industries. The goal is to gather the collective wisdom of the commissioning community and pack decades/centuries of experience and lessons learned into this new standard to provide everyone on projects the best-practices for commissioning that they can apply to their projects. When complete, this new standard will be available to all members of the Industrial Commissioning Association, which they can access for free within the ICxA Member’s Area.
The commissioning experts reviewing this document have decades of commissioning experience from all industries. For example, this document will include best-practices for oil and gas projects such as an LNG plant, best-practices for commissioning of power and cooling systems for data centers, best-practices to ensure a safe startup of high-voltage switchyards, best-practices to efficiently manage commissioning of water and wastewater treatment facilities, plus much more. With experts from each of these industries adding their expertise to the ICA Global Commissioning Standard, this will be the most comprehensive consolidation of industry expertise to help you succeed with commissioning.
We envision the ICA Global Commissioning Standard can be used in two ways:
- As a tool for discussions with others to justify the need for early commissioning involvement and to justify the need for commissioning best-practices. Having a standard to reference that reflects decades of industry knowledge and lessons learned will help showcase what others are doing on projects to achieve success, and help others see the best-practices being applied for commissioning success. This standard can be used as a tool for discussions with project owners and project management at the beginning of projects to justify investment in commissioning best-practices to save time and money on projects
- As a tool for project managers, commissioning managers, and commissioning leaders when making decisions and developing commissioning processes to apply to projects. The ICA Global Commissiong Standard can be used as a guideline to develop the required gated-commissioning workflows specific to your specific project needs. This will ensure best-practices for risk management and prevent things from getting missed, giving projects the best chance to succeed with commissioning to achieve project cost, schedule, and quality objectives
This is a new standard, and change is hard on projects – very hard. There will be some groups that choose to ignore this standard, thinking it doesn’t apply to their projects. One thing to keep in mind though is that the ICA Global Commissioning Standard applies to all projects that have mechanical, electrical, and automation systems that must function together as one plant process or energy system. “Uniqueness bias” can sometimes creep into the way people think, where they feel their projects are unique and that this standard doesn’t apply. Unless project teams are building something like the James Webb Space Telescope that has never been done before, then projects are not unique. For example, LNG plants exist all over the world, every major city has multiple water and wastewater treatment facilities, high-voltage substations exist in every country. The ICA Global Commissioning Standard applies to all sizes of projects, whether they are big multi-billion dollar megaprojects or smaller projects in the millions of dollars, and applies to all industrial plant process and energy systems. We want to get this information into your hands so you can apply these best practices to your projects, and it would be very unfortunate if these lessons learned were dismissed due to uniqueness bias, with project teams repeating the same expensive mistakes to learn these industry best-practices and lessons learned the hard way.
The timeline for development of the ICA Global Commissioning Standard is to have a first version released by the end of 2024. The standard is currently under review by our team of industry experts, with comments and feedback to be returned by the end of November. The goal is to consolidate comments into the next draft for review in December, to be released by the end of the year. This is an ambitious goal, and if not by the end of the year, the standard will certainly be issued early in 2025.
The ICA Global Commissioning Standard is for the benefit of the commissioning industry as well as everyone working on projects to finally have a guiding standard of commissioning best-practices to help all groups working on projects succeed in meeting cost, schedule, and quality objectives. Stay tuned for more updates as we work to get this new commissioning standard into your hands as soon as possible.
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