Front End

Management by Example
On June 1, a partnership including Bechtel will begin managing and operating the prestigious Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

When it was created in 1943, Los Alamos was part of the super-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Over the years, the lab’s focus has shifted to include ensuring that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable. That takes innovative science, sound operations, and efficient business systems.

Last year, Bechtel National joined with the University of California and others to form Los Alamos National Security, LLC, which competed for the lab’s management and operations contract. After a five-month study of the two competing teams’ proposals, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Bechtel and its partners the contract. DOE said “the winning team will bring to the laboratory a first-rate combination of experience … in nuclear and high-hazard environments, together with best-in-class business systems.” The team’s seven-year stint could be extended to 20 years.

Training for Train-ing
Training has a double meaning for employees modernizing the London Underground’s Jubilee, Northern, and Piccadilly train lines, especially now that Bechtel’s Tube Lines consortium has unveiled a new Skills Training Centre.

Since the $17.3 million facility opened in August 2005, more than 7,000 Tube Lines employees and contractors have completed accredited courses in subjects ranging from safe construction techniques to advanced signaling. It’s part of a larger effort to address the consortium’s long-term need for skilled workers and to help existing employees stay on top of their professions.

The center is open 24/7 to accommodate workers on different shifts. It’s home to 14 classrooms, a resource center, and, most interestingly, an indoor signals training facility the size of a rugby field, with five 25-meter-long real train tracks for hands-on instruction.

Attention to Prevention
When reports surfaced that swans in the former Soviet republic of Georgia may have died of “bird flu,” workers from a recently opened public health facility in Tbilisi jumped into action. Using modern specimen collection equipment aboard their new outbreak response vehicles, they rushed samples to the Tbilisi lab, where they confirmed that the birds died of H5N1, the virus subtype that threatens a pandemic.

Officials applauded the rapid response, which could have taken far longer if not for the lab’s timely completion last year. The vehicles, training for the lab workers, and design and construction of the lab itself were all funded by a U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency contract with Bechtel. Under the same agreement, Bechtel has completed two similar labs in Georgia, and three in Uzbekistan.

Fair Share
Picture your high school science fair—all grown up. Every three years, Bechtel offers its Frederick, Maryland-based engineers a chance to see each other’s latest innovations onstage at its employee-only Technology Fair. The most recent fair showcased 19 high-tech products and concepts that Bechtel engineers have developed and proven on customer projects worldwide. Although six judges from three of the company’s business units rate the innovations on their technical merits, the main purpose is to cross-pollinate work in Frederick’s engineering beehive. The fair’s attendees typically find new applications for the innovations on their own assignments, and add value for other customers. Recent technology transfers include a Bechtel-developed suite of 3D design automation tools called COMET, now a standard tool for estimating piping quantities on power and petrochemicals projects.

Reprise, Please
Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar project was one for the record books—even for Bechtel. Built in less than three years, it was India’s biggest industrial project to date and the largest single-stream refinery ever built from the ground up.

By the time the mega-project was completed in 1999, Bechtel had dedicated millions of job hours in its engineering offices worldwide, supplied a workforce of 75,000, and shipped hundreds of thousands of tonnes of materials to northwest India—including enough structural steel to build 19 Eiffel Towers and enough concrete for 10 Empire State Buildings.

Now Reliance has announced plans to double Jamnagar’s capacity with an investment of approximately $6 billion that will make it the world’s largest refinery in any category. And they’ve invited Bechtel back for an encore.

Bechtel Buzz
“An incredible engineering achievement.”
—Massachusetts Turnpike Authority Chairman Matt Amorello, describing substantial completion of Boston’s “Big Dig.”

Of Facts and Fiction
In a classic Dickens novel, the hero, Pip, yearns to improve himself through hard work. An avid opportunity seeker, his desires are the source of the book’s title: Great Expectations.

Readers should not be surprised to learn that PIPs—Six Sigma process improvement projects—played a key role in Bechtel’s keen pursuit of cost savings on the UK’s West Coast Main Line, now open to high-speed rail service between London and Glasgow, Scotland.

If there are any doubts, a few facts about the project’s 130 PIPs should dispel them. One PIP doubled the speed of track replacement, while halving its cost—with no on-the-job accidents. Others reduced repeat injuries, trimmed excess ballast deliveries, and eased costly service disruptions. Altogether, Six Sigma PIPs have shaved $340 million off the project’s costs since 2002—greatly exceeding expectations.

Back to top