Project Production Management

Maximizing return on capital investment remains elusive for many companies, impacting financial performance and shareholder value. At the root of the issue is overreliance on functional project management and underinvestment in managing the execution of work.

Unlike conventional project management functions that focus on the administrative aspects of a project, SPS Project Production Management solutions enable effective management of variability and use of resources resulting in enhanced quality, better control of cost and time and reduced risk of EH&S incidents.

Energy

Energy companies must efficiently find, extract and process sources of energy, from the delivery and maintenance of wells and offshore platforms to the engineering and construction of associated processing and distribution facilities. Through the use of our solutions, our customers reduce the risk of safety incidents, enhance quality, increase throughput and better control cost and time.

Our Production Management solutions enable energy companies to more effectively deliver critical capital projects, manage field development, including better control of the well delivery process, and more efficiently execute turnarounds and maintenance operations.

Industrial

Manufacturing and processing companies must continuously upgrade their production facilities to produce new products, optimize and maintain capacity and conform to regulatory requirements. From complex expansions to critical projects such as automotive plant line conversions, semiconductor tooling change-outs and processing plant turnarounds, our Production Management solutions enable our customers to better control time to market, reduce the risk of cost and schedule overruns and mitigate environmental, health, safety and security incidents.

Civil

Building and maintaining civil infrastructure is fundamental to sustaining a productive society. Civil infrastructure provides the means to educate citizens, deliver healthcare and ensure security. It makes water safe, energy readily available and transportation efficient. Unfortunately, regardless of its criticality to society, civil infrastructure projects all too often do not meet intended objectives. The issue has become so serious that required investment is now unable to keep pace with the needs of many governments and communities.

Through the use of SPS Production Management solutions, our customers have been able to deliver complex and critical hospital, transportation and utility projects within cost, schedule and quality objectives without experiencing claims.

About

Founded in 2000, SPS has enabled customers to effectively deliver some of the world’s most critical projects, from vast energy field developments to complex industrial facilities and major civil engineering works. We do this through the application of our Production Management solutions enabled by SPS|Production Manager - our proprietary suite of software tools.

SPS Production Management solutions enable customers to compress project durations while reducing cost and use of cash. They achieve this through addressing a significant gap in the current approach to project delivery – the overreliance on the administrative aspects of project management and the underinvestment in management of work (both knowledge and craft).

Unlike project management practices and measurements that are qualitative, SPS PPM solutions are built upon an Operations Science foundation, providing effective elimination of unnecessary use of resources. Learn more.

SPS offers a variety of solutions to effectively map, model, analyze, simulate, optimize and control Project Production Systems from engineering through fabrication and construction / commissioning. Our solutions are also used to understand and influence other types of production systems including processing, manufacturing and job shops all of which are most often elements of a project supply network.

Leadership

Roberto J. Arbulu

Senior Vice President, Technical Services

Arbulu has twenty three years of experience in the delivery and optimization of major capital projects in the oil and gas, mining, industrial and civil infrastructure sectors. He has authored several papers that have been published in various trade journals and presented at conferences around the world including being a lead instructor for the Stanford CIFE / SPS VDC Certificate program. Roberto earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. He also holds masters degree in Construction Engineering and Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

H.J. James Choo, PhD

Chief Technical Officer

Choo has over twenty five years of experience in research, development and implementation of solutions for optimizing the delivery of complex and critical capital projects. He has published numerous papers on the subject in various technical journals, which have been presented at global conferences and are regularly cited by other authors. James earned an M.S. in Civil Engineering from Yonsei University, Korea, and a PhD in Construction Engineering & Management from the University of California at Berkeley.

Ed Pound

Director, Production System Optimization

Pound has more than twenty-five years’ experience in manufacturing, having worked in general management, operations, purchasing and product development. With a deep background in manufacturing and supply chain operations, Ed has helped pioneer the advanced benefits that the practical science of Factory Physics® principles brings to business. Ed earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, a Master of Engineering Management degree from Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, and Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Alabama.

Jim Richardson

Senior Vice President, Solutions

Richardson brings thirty years of leadership experience in the oil and gas industry, including twenty-two years with a US supermajor covering drilling and completions, field development, capital projects and production operations in the UK North Sea, North America, Africa and Papua New Guinea. He has operated in an advisory capacity to board level executives in industry leading super majors and emerging North American onshore operators and has been involved directly in advising and leading major capital projects for over fifteen years. He holds a B.Eng. in Mining and Petroleum Engineering from the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.

Mark L. Spearman, PhD

Director, Technical Solutions

Spearman brings over thirty years’ experience in the optimization of manufacturing supply chains by improving on-time delivery, increasing productivity and reducing cycle times and inventories. He is the founder of Factory Physics, Inc., providing the scientific framework to control and optimize the fundamental operations of any manufacturing and supply chain system. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Factory Physics. Mark holds a PhD in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University and has been a tenured professor at Northwestern University, Georgia Tech and Texas A&M.

Todd R. Zabelle

Founder & CEO

Zabelle has more than thirty years of experience in the delivery of complex and critical capital projects. He was the founder and president of Pacific Contracting, an equity partner in the Lean Construction Institute (LCI), and founder of the Project Production Institute (PPI).