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Technical Aspects of Equipment Procurement PDF
Technical Aspects of Equipment Procurement PDF
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Proceeding for the Purchase
Inspection and Testing of the Equipment
Administration of Supply Contract terms
Receiving the Equipment at Construction Site
Regarding the equipment procurement process, one important thing to consider is that
this activity is different based on the geographical location of the processing unit.
Depending on whether this is being done in North America, the Middle East, Africa,
European Union, Asia-Pacific or South Asia, the equipment procurement has its own
individual characteristics. This article will provide below listed 8 important ideas related to
the technical aspects of equipment procurement.
Hence, Floating an enquiry for a piece of particular equipment to all the listed for that
equipment is not a practical thing to do. In such a situation, An experienced purchase
professional should trim the list of these vendors based on his knowledge of the vendor’s
capabilities and restrict his enquiry to a top few vendors. It is preferable to restrict floating
an enquiry to 4 to 5 vendors.
An experienced equipment procurement engineer must identify all such equipment at the
earliest stage of a project and ensure that the inquiries are fast-tracked. Generally,
various organizations have their own terms to decide long-lead items depending on the
type of plant being installed. As a rule-of-thumb, any item with a lead time of more than 8
calendar months can be considered as long-lead in today’s perspective of fast-tracked
plants.
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Raising Technical Query (TQ) and Resolution for the equipment
In terms of the submission of offers as per the inquiry, efficient procurement personnel
should continuously keep track of the responses provided by each vendor. He or she
must be familiar with the process of raising “Technical Queries”, popularly known as
“TQ” on the offers provided by the vendors. Most companies have a standard TQ format
for various types of standard equipment.
Most of the time, individual engineering disciplines raise the TQ’s in their own TQ formats.
The procurement engineer must collate all this information in one document for the sake
of clarity and final documentation.
Some of the good procurement engineers prefer to follow this very principle. Obviously,
an advance discussion agenda must be provided to the party with whom you want the
discussion to happen to make the meeting more fruitful.
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Technical Bid Evaluation (TBE)
Based on TQ resolution, when the offers from the vendors are streamlined to match the
project requirements the “Technical Bid Analysis (/Evaluation)” abbreviated as “TBA
(/or TBE)” is conducted by the engineering design disciplines with active support
and follow-up from the procurement engineer.
Most of the reputed/established engineering companies have their standard TBA formats
for standard process plant equipment. The purpose of the TBA is to compare the
offers of the vendors in the race for bagging the equipment order strictly from a
technical viewpoint. The standard TBA worksheet has the benchmarking
parameters of the particular equipment in the first column of the worksheet and the
subsequent columns are information provided by the vendors against those
benchmarked parameters.
For example, if you have 4 vendors for the same equipment there will be 4 columns in the
worksheet for filling the data provided by the vendors against the selected pre-decided
parameters. A summary section provided in the worksheet will rate each vendor’s overall
technical capabilities and provide rankings and in some cases, even reject one or more of
the vendors.
However, The aforementioned steps do not end the procurement cycle or the
responsibility of the procurement engineer. The logistics of equipment procurement now
come into the forefront including items such as stage-wise inspection, factory acceptance
test, test certification, packing, shipping, warehouse storage, insurance, and demurrage.
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Few more Useful Resources for you.
About the Author: This article is written by Mr. Ankur Srivastava, a Chemical Engineer
with more than 32 years of process engineering experience in oil and gas, refining,
polymers and petrochemical industries.
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