Featuring experts from GoldQuest, Codelco and Worley
If you ask capital project teams in Latin America how they manage their projects, you'll hear three answers. Some run full Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) programs, some manage scope with a traditional WBS, and most work somewhere in between and choose project by project. O3's Karina Pérez, Commercial Manager for Latin America, opened our September 30 webinar, Ejecución Digital de Proyectos en la Práctica, with that observation. She followed it with the idea that carried the rest of the hour: whichever path a team takes, it wants predictable delivery on time and on budget, and it needs one connected source of truth to get there.
Attendees joined from Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Peru to hear three panelists who started from very different places. Marcelo Fernández of GoldQuest structured his project around AWP before any EPC was awarded. Carla Vivallos of Codelco leads AWP across a portfolio where some projects adopted it during early studies and others brought it in during construction. Juan Velasco of Worley leads AWP at a global EPC that made the methodology a company standard. What follows are the ideas that stayed with us.
Marcelo has spent more than 30 years on expansion and greenfield projects in natural gas, mining and metals, in Chile, Peru, Argentina, Australia and the Dominican Republic. He first worked with AWP through CII's Implementation Resource 272 in 2013, and in 2019 he applied it without software on a heap leach expansion in Argentina. The lesson he brought to GoldQuest's Proyecto Romero is about where AWP has to start:
“If you don't manage to set things up well from front-end planning, detailed engineering gets complicated, and so does the relationship with the EPC, or with the engineer and the builder.”
He admitted he once cared only about workface planning and installation work packages. Today his focus is front-end planning.
The Romero team is building its project definition package inside O3. They set up the WBS first so that everyone uses the same language and no one invents areas that don't exist. A contract quilt assigns each WBS element to the contract that owns each phase of work, and the contracts themselves live in O3. With early input from Fluor, the team loaded the preliminary RFQs its procurement strategy requires.
Marcelo called permitting a nightmare, so permits got the same treatment. The team built the full permit matrix, a precedence diagram and a schedule. Then they loaded every permit into O3 with its attributes, so the legal team can record progress in the same environment the project team monitors.
The path of construction is the most visual part. The 3D model doesn't exist yet, so the team worked from the 2D prefeasibility plot plans. They defined construction work areas and packages for the underground mine ramp, the process plant, a 27-kilometer access road with three bridges and a tunnel, and the power line that runs beside the road. Temporary logistics have their own packages because the site will go 12 to 18 months without its main road, and a risk breakdown structure is in place with an owner for each risk area. Marcelo summed up the goal:
“What we're after is avoiding Excel spreadsheets and documents that live separately on different computers. This is going to be a common center for collaborative work.”
That is the case for a Common Data Environment on a mining project.
Read the full GoldQuest success story here.
Carla is Senior BIM AWP Lead in Engineering and Construction Management at Codelco's Vice Presidency of Projects. She is a civil engineer with 20 years in mining and civil projects and holds CII's AWP certification. The title of her talk stated her argument: AWP is not all or nothing. She also explained why Codelco treats AWP and BIM as a single practice:
“In AWP and BIM we see two methodologies that, although they are different and can be implemented separately, we make one.”
AWP sets how the project is managed across its life cycle, bringing design, commissioning, procurement and contracts together, and BIM connects the geometry to the data behind it. Projects move through FEL stage gates. Carla said that projects set up with AWP from the study stages reach the investment decision with aligned deliverables and are much easier to run than projects that add it during construction. Doing this is demanding in a portfolio with six project types, megaprojects that coordinate more than ten disciplines, models with thousands of tags and millions of attributes, and brownfield work next to operating plants.
She also described benefits that are hard to quantify but real: clearer and verifiable scope, the ability to see where scope is missing, traceable information, early integration of commissioning, better constraint management and fewer causes of plan failure.
Codelco rolled AWP out gradually. A market study tied to its 2030 digital roadmap led to O3 as the AWP platform, while BIM design tools stayed open by project type. Codelco chose projects based on contract difficulty, number of disciplines and duration, since a two-month contract isn't worth a learning curve. The first pilots cross-checked the model against the AWP master index, CAPEX and schedule, and showed how vulnerable their manual reconciliation had been. Carla was candid about the people side too:
“We had focused in a very technical way on design, engineering and having platforms, but change management with people fell behind.”
Showing teams the benefit of leaving a traditional routine takes time. Codelco connected its Aconex document control to O3 through an API and worked with the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CChC) on a guide to BIM and AWP requirements for mining projects. As design, contracts, procurement, documents and progress come together in one place, she said, teams start to see that a single source of information is possible.
Juan is Director of Project Management and Global AWP Lead at Worley and an active CII member. Worley requires AWP on its large and mega projects whether or not the Owner asks for it. He explained that Worley wants to deliver full EPC and EPCM scope across many industries, and a common methodology gives it the consistency that becomes certainty about where each project stands.
To build the practice, Worley closed gaps in its standards and wrote a RACI that covers every AWP activity. It kept the nomenclature simple enough to work in every sector and wrote role playbooks and training. AWP is now part of project delivery from pre-FEED onward, and no function defines its packages on its own. Each large project has an AWP implementation plan and trained people, gate reviews check AWP readiness, and dashboards track adoption.
Juan divides AWP enablement into two levels. The first is the project foundation:
The second level is workface planning. Seeing a project in color in the model is a real step forward, but for Juan it is only the first one:
“Seeing is the beginning.”
The value appears when teams release constraints, size IWPs so they can start and finish, and plan from the packages instead of only reflecting what happens in the field. That requires unit rates, rules of credit, installable quantities, material assignment, fabrication status, vendor models with installable detail and a resource-loaded schedule. Vendors usually have the detail, so the request belongs in the FEED negotiation.
He finished with the conditions that complicate any mandate: contract type, third-party engineering, packages defined from an engineering view, client technology preferences and how involved the Owner is. His conclusion matched Carla's:
“It's not binary, it's not zero or one. You can get many benefits by applying it as far as you can.”
Assess where the project stands, decide what is realistic, mitigate what you can't do and keep the principles. If foundations missed workface planning, apply it to piping and steel. See how Worley scaled AWP across the company in Standardizing the Digital Backbone: How Worley Scaled AWP Globally with O3.
Karina closed with four lessons. Here they are, with the context the panel gave them.
Watch the full webinar from GoldQuest, Codelco and Worley here.