Project Logistics: Supply Chain Orchestration for Project Owners

Project Owners can Digitalize and Transform Project Logistics

Given that major projects often have billions of dollars invested and multiple parties managing them, there is a lot at stake, and the ability for a project to be completed on time and within budget is heavily reliant on the efficiency of the project supply chain. However, project owners often still face major challenges due to a lack of visibility, transparency, and control over their project supply chain.

e2log CEO & Founder, Adolph Colaco and Mark Scott, CTO & Co-Founder discuss how to transform project logistics to overcome these challenges and bring lifecycle orchestration, global transportation management, and real-time visibility into a convenient single view.

Full Episode Transcript
This transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors.

Adolph Colaco:

Hi, I’m Adolph Colaco, the CEO of e2log. e2log is the world’s most advanced platform for global logistics. We bring together all the lifecycle orchestration, global transportation management and real-time visibility all into a single platform.

We talk to project owners on a regular basis, and one of the most common problems that we hear from them is the lack of visibility, transparency and control that they have over their project supply chain. This is actually pretty shocking because these major projects which are done have investments of billions of dollars and there are multiple parties involved. So much money is being spent on this. There’s so much riding on the efficiency of the supply chain.

The ability for a project to be delivered on schedule and budget is heavily dependent on the efficiency of the project supply chain. But yet, this is a huge problem. Why does this occur?

One of the most fundamental reasons that we have seen is because of the fact that major projects are executed by multiple engineering, procurement, construction companies or partners for the project owner.

So imagine a case where a project owner has got, let’s say, three EPCs who are executing the project for them, plus they have their internal teams. Each EPC has their own supply chain organization. They’ve got their own systems, they’ve got their own tools, they have their own logistics providers. And imagine there are three such subsets which are working in isolation, one from the other.

These EPCs are working in silos, but the project owner at the end of the day needs to have a unified view of what’s happening across each of these EPCs and their supply chains. There just isn’t a simple way to do this.

So the consequence is that it’s a very fragmented supply chain. The project managers, the project directors are struggling for information. They just do not know when to expect material. They do not have the ability to plan their business very efficiently. And this has a very significant impact on the ability for project managers and project directors to be able to actually deliver these projects on schedule and on time. e2log actually overcomes this very same problem.

We built a very unique technology which allows the data associated with the supply chain from each of the EPCs to be pulled together onto a single digital platform. And this is then manifested through a virtual control tower to the project owner.

The project owners, the project management team, the supply chain team and others have now a unified view of the end-to-end supply chain of each of the three EPCs as an example, as their executing. Orders can be viewed in one place as they’re being expedited, the revised statuses of these orders as the goods are being shipped, the status of these individual shipments as they’re moving through. And eventually the ability to predict when the goods are going to arrive at the project site.

So that ability to have visibility, transparency and control through a virtual control tower is the big value delivery that we do. In addition to this, one of the huge challenges that CFOs and project controllers face is a lack of insight into the cost commitments that are being made for these projects by the supply chain team.

e2log has the ability to actually roll up this information as purchase orders are being issued. All of those commitments are visible to the platform as logistics services are being committed to, those costs can be rolled up and can be accrued. So that is extremely powerful because now project controllers and CFOs are able to actually see on a real time basis what kind of cost commitments are being made by the supply chain team, be it on the material procurement side, be it on the logistics side, and they now have the ability to accrue those costs upfront. So e2log delivers tremendous value when it comes to project owners. It’s a very unique solution, it’s a very powerful solution, and it uses some of the cutting edge technology of what is out there to help solve real world problems associated with project management.

Here’s a short demo from Mark Scott, our CTO, who is the mastermind behind building this technology along with his team. I hope you will find his insight extremely useful and you can see the value that e2log can deliver for your project management. Thank you.

Mark Scott:

Thanks, Adolph. Before we get into the demonstration, I just want to take a second to explain how e2log has been built to specially cater to the needs of project companies. We recognize that project companies are working with multiple EPCs, who work with multiple suppliers, and multiple logistics service providers as well.

e2log fits in the middle of these, complementing this process. So as purchase orders flow through between EPCs and suppliers, e2log begins to gather data. As expediting and packing is happening the ship group files end up in e2log as well. And as the packing list is provided by the suppliers, this also gets aggregated in e2log where we can begin to offer quality control and make sure that the data is accurate.

We then help package this up to go to the logistics service providers and then as tracking milestones come back, we are able to push those back to the EPCs but ultimately to the staging warehouses and project sites.

The byproduct of this is we can create an overarching control center for the project teams that provides order status, site management, shipment tracking cost and invoice management and real time analytics. And we do this across the entire group of EPCs that any project company is working with, and we do it in a special way by just connecting into existing processes, scraping email, regular reports that are sent out so that there’s no disruption in the process that’s happening today.

The byproduct of this is extremely powerful analytics, so we’re able to show order information across the entire project. We gather information from all suppliers, and EPCs, users can quickly and easily search for orders in the site, they can get up to the minute status on where these orders are. Are they going to be on time? Are they going to be delayed? And allow project managers and site managers to begin to plan for any disruptions.

On top of that, we allow project companies and EPCs to manage performance of all the users in the ecosystem. We show how EPCs are performing across the entire spectrum of the operation, and we do that down to the site level, so users of our platform can actually see in real time where their shipments are. As they’re coming in to a project site, they can drill in and see what orders are where across the project site spectrum. And on top of this, we allow the visibility of the costs of the entire operation, so project teams can manage to their budget, they can see what their spend is, they can see their spend across EPCs, across mode of transportation, across logistics, suppliers and so forth.

But it’s not just the financial impacts we’re measuring, it’s also the carbon emissions that we’re managing as well. So that project teams get visibility on the full spectrum of their level three logistics carbon expenses for any ESG reporting as well.

So ultimately, what are we doing? We’re scraping all this data and giving the control and visibility back to the project teams. And we’re doing this in a very simple way that is not disruptive to any of the existing processes. We’re excited to show you what e2log is capable of in your project and look forward to working with you. Thank you.

>> Learn more: View a short video demo of e2log