Replacing the daily contractor phone-round at a refinery

The operating situation

Project status on a large refinery site lived with contractors and site engineers, and reached management the way it always had: someone senior spent a large part of every day on the phone collecting it, then assembled it into a report. By the time a slip appeared in a management pack it had usually already happened. The cost was not the phone calls — it was that decisions were being made on information that was already stale.

Inside the workflow

1. 01

   Mapped the reporting chain end to end: who knew what, when, and how it travelled

2. 02

   Built structured status collection that calls and messages contractors on a schedule, in their own language

3. 03

   Replaced free-text updates with structured capture against named milestones

4. 04

   Automatic chasing of any vendor who had not reported by the cut-off

5. 05

   Exception alerting the moment a milestone or dependency moved

6. 06

   Management reporting assembled from collected data rather than from a person

The system scope

A vendor and project status system that performs the daily and hourly follow-up that was previously manual, captures progress as structured data, chases non-responders, and produces the reporting layer automatically.

What changed

Status collection moved from manually assembled reporting to an ongoing structured flow, returning senior attention to the work of running the project.

The operating boundary

This did not remove a project manager's judgement and was never meant to. It removed much of the repetitive work of assembling the facts needed to apply that judgement.