Piping is one of the most complex and time-intensive disciplines to plan in industrial construction. It requires careful consideration of adjacency, elevation, bore size, constructability sequencing, and material types. At the same time, projects across the industry are facing a growing shortage of experienced Workface Planners. The result is a familiar pattern: delayed planning cycles, inconsistent Installation Work Package (IWP) quality, and planners spending too much time on manual scoping instead of field coordination and constraint resolution.
O3’s new Automated IWP Creation for Piping changes that equation.
This release extends O3’s automated planning engine to one of the most labor-heavy areas of work packaging, enabling teams to generate piping IWPs automatically using piping-specific grouping logic that reflects real construction best practices.
Workface Planners often spend a disproportionate amount of time scoping piping IWPs manually. That effort includes evaluating adjacency, managing elevation changes, separating small and large bore work, and ensuring constructability boundaries make sense for crews in the field. When planner capacity is limited, planning is forced closer to IWP release, limiting construction’s ability to manage and avoid constraints, and valuable expertise gets consumed by repetitive scoping tasks instead of higher-value decision making.
Piping has historically been difficult to automate because of its complexity. But as O3 has expanded automated planning across other disciplines, piping has remained a prime opportunity to unlock meaningful time savings and consistency.
This release brings that opportunity to life.
With automated IWP creation for piping, planners can generate piping IWPs directly from a selected CWP with minimal setup. The system evaluates constructability criteria and produces a default set of IWPs that reflect industry-standard grouping logic.
The automation engine considers:
Physical adjacency of piping spools and supports
Elevation and level alignment to maintain buildable work zonesB
ore size to separate small and large bore packages where appropriate
Standard naming conventions for clean, consistent outputs
Instead of building packages from scratch, planners receive ready-to-review IWPs that require only light refinement, if any.
In practice, this means a planner can:
Select an area and discipline
Generate a recommended set of piping IWPs
Review and adjust boundaries as needed
Approve and publish packages into the normal IWP lifecycle
Automation handles the heavy lifting. Planners apply their expertise where it matters most.
The primary beneficiary of this release is the Workface Planner. By reducing manual scoping time, planners gain back capacity to focus on constructability reviews, field coordination, and constraint mitigation. Instead of rebuilding IWPs repeatedly, they can validate and fine-tune packaging logic with confidence.
Construction Managers and Superintendents benefit as well. Earlier access to structured IWPs improves planning visibility, strengthens alignment between planning and execution teams, and creates more consistency in how work is packaged across areas and planners.
The result is not just faster planning, but better planning.
Automated IWP creation for piping is part of O3’s broader commitment to intelligent planning. By embedding discipline-specific rules, constructability heuristics, and flexible user controls into the packaging process, O3 helps teams move faster while maintaining trust in the output.
This release does not replace planners, it allows already resource-constrained teams to do more, at higher quality, with their existing teams.
By shifting the burden of raw scoping to automation, planners can focus on judgment, coordination, and execution readiness. That is how projects move from reactive planning to proactive delivery.
Want to see automated IWP creation in action? Schedule your personalized demo of O3 today and learn how to amplify your team’s productivity and success.