Featuring experts from Técnicas Reunidas, Streicher, and Saudi Aramco
Picture a superintendent walking the site on Monday morning. Engineering is 92% complete, procurement is 85 complete, the schedule is on track, and the crews are mobilized. Every dashboard is green. So he asks a simple question: can my crew start the work package today? The answer is no. Not because labor is short or material is missing, but because the work never reached the field in a form the crew could act on.
That scenario opened our recent webinar, The Gap Nobody Talks About — Between the Model and the Field, moderated by Dr. Jacques Khouri and featuring three leaders who live this problem every day: Joaquin Hernandez Meseguer of Técnicas Reunidas, Mauro Scarabelli of Streicher, and Dr. Omar Lara Castro of Saudi Aramco. What follows are the ideas that stayed with us.
When we polled the audience, almost no one said they rarely struggle to turn a digitally complete project into work the field can execute. The majority landed on "most of the time," and that matched what the panel described from their own projects. A model can be perfectly built, populated with metadata, and tied to an approved schedule, and the site can still stall because constraints are unresolved, material is not confirmed at the work front, or the right information never made it into the crew's hands. As Jacques put it, a green dashboard proves very little on its own. The real test is whether the right crew can perform the right work at the right time with no surprises.
All three panelists agreed on why capital projects are pouring effort into digital twins. Work now runs on data, and the teams that gather accurate, usable information and move it quickly are the ones that stay in control instead of reacting after the fact. Mauro framed the goal plainly. He wants his project management team in command of the work rather than stuck reconstructing why something slipped after it is already too late to recover.
Joaquin pushed the point further. For an EPC, the twin brings engineering, procurement, construction, and increasingly commissioning into one data environment, which improves productivity, decision support, data quality, and the handover to the client. His key message was that the twin's value comes from how well it connects to the execution process, not from the model on its own. Without that connection, the investment underdelivers. For Dr. Omar, the benefit that matters most to an owner is predictability. Cost, schedule, and safety are all watched closely, and a twin that lets an owner forecast the finish within a tolerance is a major advantage on a mega project.
Mauro described physical progress as an obsession, and for good reason. You can nudge a procurement or engineering figure and mitigate the gap for a while, but cubic meters of poured concrete tell the truth. When physical progress holds, it usually means preparation, logistics, design release, and constraint removal all happened correctly. When it slips, it is the first signal that something upstream went wrong. On his projects, subcontractors rarely raise a hand before the gap appears. It surfaces halfway through the month, and by the time the team traces it back, the real picture is often worse than anyone admitted at the start. Replacing that reactive scramble is exactly the point.
The panel was candid about the causes, and Dr. Omar described the owner's version of the problem. On a mega project with many contractors, every company arrives with its own structure, data specifications, software, and platforms, and stitching all of that into a single source of oversight becomes the hardest part of the job. Joaquin put a number on the sprawl. Técnicas Reunidas runs roughly 128 different applications and databases across engineering, procurement, and construction on a single project, and getting those to communicate through one platform, with consistent data structure and quality, is what makes real decisions possible.
Inside a single contractor, the friction shows up as silos. Joaquin described engineering focused on deliverables, procurement on supply chain, construction on short-term execution, and planning on the schedule, each with its own priorities and no shared language. Inconsistent data models and the absence of a standard tagging structure turned integration into a recurring fight.
Jacques offered the framing that tied the session together. A digital twin is like a map, full of detail and possible routes. Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) is the road drawn clearly through that map, the defined path from where you are to where the project needs to end. A twin on its own shows you everything. AWP tells the crew what to build, in what order, once every constraint is cleared.
Dr. Omar reinforced that AWP is well proven, not theoretical. It comes out of research at the Construction Industry Institute, and Aramco recently completed its own study on the steps an owner should follow for a successful implementation. Joaquin's team reached AWP while searching for a way to serve clients who each wanted a different twin. Standardization, from tagging conventions like CFIHOS to structured work packaging, let them integrate everything in one platform rather than building eight versions of the same thing.
Asked what they would change if they could start over, the three converged. Every one of them would start with standards on day zero. Joaquin highlighted that data quality is mandatory, especially now that EPC engineering teams span countries with different conventions, from Spain to India. He would also insist on knowing the final daily users before implementing anything, and he would build or buy a data lake for quality validation, since many commercial twins lack one. Looking ahead, he sees the biggest opportunity in AI, from risk prediction and automated progress measurement using drone reality capture to a clean transition into an operational twin the owner can use for years after handover.
Dr. Omar would lock in a solid contractual foundation and agree on data structure and requirements before the project starts, so integration is designed in rather than patched during execution. He pointed to a project where the data connection between contractors and the main platform was set up poorly and had to be reworked mid-contract, which caused real delays. Mauro would embed the methodology at the early design stage now that his organization understands the benefits, and he is increasingly comfortable seeing it written into contracts given how much flexibility it has shown.
Streicher is early in its first adoption, and the direction is encouraging. A delay on above-ground work that would normally have dragged on became actionable far sooner once constraints were listed properly and the site fed real information upward. The team had been 2% behind schedule and expected to break even that week, capping a positive trend of seven to eight weeks. Just as important, the pool of claims and disruption requests dropped sharply, which protects the budget in a way he said he has rarely seen. Joaquin described similar gains at Técnicas Reunidas: better visibility across engineering, procurement, and construction, earlier identification of risks and constraints, less rework, and a smoother handover from a single source of truth. His phrase for it was “predictive project control” instead of “reactive firefighting.”
For teams wondering about effort, the panel gave honest numbers. Joaquin put three months as a good target to lay the foundation, after which the build gets easier, and he strongly recommended bringing in an experienced advisor for the first project rather than going alone. Mauro's first implementation is running closer to four months before a proper startup, improving steadily from there. The shared lesson is that the first project is the investment, and the payoff compounds afterward.
The session closed with an announcement. O3 and Técnicas Reunidas have co-authored a white paper that lays out the challenges facing owners, EPCs, and contractors, the solution that closes the gap, and the story of how it was proven on the Lower Zakum development, the second-largest offshore project in the world. You can read it here.
If this resonates with your projects, the conversation continues in person at the ConFex Conference in Dubai on September 9 and 10, where the O3 team will run a workshop on turning the model into executable field work.
Watch the full webinar here.