Today, review and approval processes for engineering technical documents, requests for quote, PO’s, and action items should be executed, tracked, and managed online at this point. It makes the whole mess and turns it into a nice trackable, accountable system.

We’re also hearing that most systems that manage any review and approval process have some major flaws. Either they can be really expensive, incomplete clunky and sometimes all three.

An example of an incomplete system a client told me about was unable to compile markups during reviews and approval processes. This created a manual process where there’s a human being that draws a salary that has to go and transpose any markups at the end of the revision cycle and keep all the papers with red ink in a file cabinet. There simply was no place for them in their document management system.

Clients and prospective clients also hearing that most apps they encounter don’t provide proper accountability, visibility, or team integration. This is a huge problem. The global nature of oil and gas, EPC and capital construction industries dictates that engineering could take place in New York or Houston and the fabrication could take place in Singapore, or Korea and the MC and commissioning could take place in the middle of the ocean you have an offshore vessel. Try sending a courier to the middle of the pacific!

The ability to integrate these teams and have some visibility into the execution of review and approvals, and enforce some accountability within reviews and approvals is terribly important.

We’re also hearing that it’s very difficult to find a system that will actually speed up review and approval turn arounds. Basically, if the system is smart enough to help execute the markups, and compile the markups, and then return those approvals all in the same closed-loop system – there is a very good chance that the application is so clunky that the process takes forever.

We have found that in order to be the best solution for oil and gas, EPC, and capital construction, your tools need to get all the teams working in the same system. It has to automate otherwise manual processes. No printing, no manual transposing or compiling, none of that. You have got to get accountability and visibility built into the application so you know where things are at, who’s doing what, and make sure that things are getting done. Those are the minimum technical competencies.

In this economic environment, all costs are scrutinized closely. You have to find that elusive affordable, closed-loop system that works.

Part of having an affordable system that works these days is having a cloud-based system. Gone are the days of managing systems like these for global teams in house. Businesses just can’t compete with cloud providers on cost, reliability, and security. It’s a great idea to have a Cloud based application because users want on demand access to review and approve tasks online. Moreover, managers need teams to have easy access to tasks and project data so they are never sitting idle, waiting for an email or courier to arrive with the next batch of work.

Your app needs role based permissions as well. Role based permissions should go much deeper than read only and edit permissions. Your projects and project roles are dynamic – you systems should be too. You want the ability to set a system up to allow teams to contribute without sacrificing the overall security of your sensitive information.

A cloud based system with smart role-based permissions provides more security than doing these reviews and approvals via email. In an email based process, somebody in the review and approval loop could forward sensitive data to anybody or include inconvenient people in the conversation. There’s really no security there. The same thing with most common communication media like Skype. Some companies try to drag files over into messenger to transmit them that way. It might be a little quicker for the here and now but at the end of the day, not having visibility into that process is going to cost some time down the road and not to mention a terrible information security practice.

Client integration is another important part as well, with sometimes clients being in the UK and engineering teams being in Houston for these EPC projects. Being able to integrate your clients into your workflows and say, hey, check off on this, make sure it’s okay. Without having to physically send a document over the Atlantic is huge. When your clients can log into a Cloud based system and see the work you’ve done and put their stamp of approval on it, it definitely speeds turnaround times and probably increases credibility as well. Because it shows that you have the capability to deliver your engineering deliverables in the document management context anyway, through an online system in a nice neat package.

The second thing I mentioned was automating otherwise manual processes. The ideal application allows you to enforce the right work flow, you’ll enforce the engineering and technical or supplier data workflows as you have defined them. You should also be able to enforce Requisition workflows and HSE workflows as well. These are all different and for instance, the HSE, that workflow would have tasks and correspondence that bounces back and forth until an outcome is agreed upon and then that item can be closed out, which is different than the other ones. Within these workflows and these different types you can automate them and this is huge because an automated workflow really reduces the variables and minimizes the effort and manual oversight. The follow through is much better when your workflows automated.

Review and approvals should be executed as in-application tasks, so users can create and assign and complete tasks in the application. This is beneficial because the right application can report on all of the important metadata associated with completing the task.

The last thing I want to mention here is that tasks are personal and if you’re looking at other applications make sure that this is the case so individuals log in and individual users receive tasks rather than groups. This increases ownership and reduces the possibility of finger pointing and other antics like that. Which leads nicely into my third point here is project tools providing accountability and viability. As I mentioned the tasks should be user based, so they’re directed at people rather than groups. This means that you should be able to see who is performing well and who is behind.

To see how ProjecTools handles review and approval processes, please view the video above.