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Bechtel’s Impact Report

Bechtel and Cumulus: Increasing productivity through digital solutions

  • 07 September 2022
    Houston
  • Chemicals, Energy, Energy, Engineering, Procurement & Construction, Industry Leadership , Innovation, Path to Net Zero, Press Release, Sustainability Solutions, Technology

Pennsylvania Chemicals project utilizes digital tool to dramatically reduce leak rates

Cumulus Digital Systems, a global technology platform enabling connected work, today announced a successful partnership with Bechtel to deploy a bolted joint management system at scale. In addition to enforcing engineering controls and improving productivity, the deployment also successfully reduced the bolted connection leak rate to 0.1 percent, a 100 times reduction compared to the industry average of 10 percent.

"The strong results from our partnership with Bechtel demonstrate the value that digitalization brings to construction," said Matthew Kleiman, CEO of Cumulus. "We are excited to take this partnership even further and continue to use technology to eliminate rework and enable greater work transparency."

Ineffective bolted joint management causes leaks that emit over 170 million metric tons of greenhouse gas annually. Furthering its commitment to reduce emissions and improve safety, Bechtel elected to implement Cumulus Smart Torque System (STS) during the construction of the Pennsylvania Chemicals project.

Cumulus' patented STS technology consists of three main components:

  1. Control center: Cloud-hosted dashboard and database for managing data and visualizing activities in the field
  2. Mobile application: Guides workers through each step of their workflow, communicates with the control center, and connects with tools via Bluetooth
  3. Connected tools: Sets target values and records actual values achieved in real time through the wireless Bluetooth connection

Kleiman is joined by John Tottenham, innovation implementation manager at Bechtel, to present the technology at the Gastech 2022 Conference in Milan, Italy.

Bechtel has spent more than a century helping customers navigate shifts in energy consumption, technological change, financing challenges, and a sharpening focus on sustainable alternatives.

"We are continually focused on applying proven and emerging technologies to lower carbon emissions," said John Tottenham, Bechtel's innovation implementation manger. "By pairing our data management system with Cumulus' platform, we were able to implement digital solutions using data-backed insights to meet customer goals while continuing to improve safety for our people, our communities, and the planet."  

To learn more, download the whitepaper or visit www.cumulusds.com.

About Cumulus Digital Systems

Cumulus digitalizes manual work that is mission-critical, high volume, and difficult to automate to ensure that this work is done right the first time, every time. Its software improves the quality and productivity of safety-critical workflows, and is used to configure and visualize work activities across a wide range of industries. Cumulus is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. www.cumulusds.com.

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About Bechtel

Bechtel is a trusted engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government. Differentiated by the quality of our people and our relentless drive to deliver the most successful outcomes, we align our capabilities to our customers’ objectives to create a lasting positive impact. Since 1898, we have helped customers complete more than 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents that have created jobs, grown economies, improved the resiliency of the world's infrastructure, increased access to energy, resources, and vital services, and made the world a safer, cleaner place.  

Bechtel serves the Energy; Infrastructure; Manufacturing & Technology; Mining & Metals; and Nuclear, Security & Environmental markets. Our services span from initial planning and investment, through start-up and operations. www.bechtel.com

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