Webcast: Competitive Intelligence for Large Construction Projects
In this webcast, Louise Mitchel, former Competitive Intelligence Analyst for Eskom, a large construction company shows best practices for CI in the construction industry.
The Business Intelligence (BI) unit in the Procurement and Supply Chain Department at Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned electricity utility, provided supplier and market intelligence to the project teams of two coal-fired power station projects since the start of construction in 2008. The projects are called Medupi and Kusile. When completed, each power station will have a capacity of 4,800MW. Medupi is estimated to would have cost US$10.5 billion on completion around 2020, and Kusile approximately US$12 billion by 2021.
The presentation will demonstrate how the BI team designed an early warning system which provided intelligence that put the project teams in a position to act timeously on supplier and market challenges. The major suppliers and their subcontractors, as well as the markets in which they operated were tracked by the BI team to collect information based on identified distress signals which could impact on the projects. Intelligence products were designed to enable the project teams to consult them when needed.
Key Take-Aways
- How the intelligence was used by the project teams to be fore-warned of risks posed by the numerous suppliers and the multiple markets in which they operated
- How the BI team handled time and capacity challenges
- Analytic techniques used to make sense of large volumes of information and data.
Louise Mitchel has nearly 8 years’ experience as a Competitive Intelligence Professional. Her consultancy, Boabab Intelligence, provides intelligence services to broad sectors of African economies. While employed at South Africa’s electricity utility, Eskom, she specialised in the provision of Procurement Intelligence which included intelligence to support procurement contract strategies, and the design of an early warning system for large construction projects.
She started her career as an Information Professional providing research and information services, primarily in the African mining sector. During this time she also provided internet searching training, globally, to end users in the mining industry.
She has been a presenter at a number of conferences, including the GICI Conference 2016 in Bad Nauheim, Germany, the Southern African Online Information Meeting 2016 organised by the Southern African Online User Group, and a SCIP conference in South Africa. She regularly gets invited by South African Universities as a guest lecturer.