A nuclear generating station in Illinois. Thanks to $50-billion (U.S.) in nuclear construction loan guarantees announced by the Obama administration recently, what?s expected to be a nuclear renaissance offers some interesting opportunities for Coreworx.AFP / Getty Images
Day in, day out, Coreworx Inc. stands in the shadow of giants, and that's exactly where the company wants to be.
The software firm in Kitchener, Ont., provides sophisticated project information management software to massive capital construction projects such as oil rigs, mining and nuclear power plants.
They work on many of the world's largest energy ventures, and are currently at work in 40 countries on 500 projects worth more than $500-billion. Mega-projects are their specialty - they pass on jobs valued at less than $500-million, and count Fluor - one of the world's largest engineering companies, and Chevron, their top two clients. They have been hired to keep the world's largest project at the moment - the $30-billion Wheatstone LNG venture off the western coast of Australia - on schedule and on budget.
"What's really interesting for us is how small we are in comparison to the size of projects we work on," says Brent Shellhammer, Coreworx senior vice-president of marketing. "The core of what we do has a long history, but we focus on putting value-added capabilities on top of the basic project documentation, and we've built a number of solutions and applications for things with a lot regulations, a lot of labour, a lot that needs to be tracked in real time."
Coreworx has approximately 85 employees and is owned by Acorn Energy, a business services company based in Montchanin, Del., that is focused on the energy sector and trades on the NASDAQ for around $5 (ACFN).
Coreworx recently acquired Decision Dynamics Technology in Calgary - allowing them to add real-time cost control to their suite of software application and give projects a complete, real-time financial view as payments move through the system.
Thanks to $50-billion (U.S.) in nuclear construction loan guarantees announced by the Obama administration recently, what's expected to be a nuclear renaissance offers some interesting opportunities for Coreworx.
A nuclear construction project contains as many as one million parts and pieces, with each diagramed in 3-D and tracked throughout the process. Complex regulations require that every step is checked off. A refurbishment project alone costs $1-million a day.
An oil rig construction is made up of as many as 800,000 parts and drawings, and hundreds and thousands of subcontractors - one, say, to do the pipe fitting on the right side, and a different one to handle the pipe fitting on the left side. Each step of the project requires precise and complex interface management.
"It sounds pretty simple, but when you have 600,000 of those interfaces things can get pretty challenging," Mr. Shellhammer says. "We can track design changes from beginning to end."
The software and applications Coreworx has built captures data from contracts and a project manager will see a dashboard that automatically tells them what's on time, what's on budget and what isn't.
"It gives a project manager a very easy way to manager the 6,000 things they have to do in any given day," Mr. Shellhamer says. "There are an incredible number of design considerations and complex workflows. We give them the ability to consolidate and score, which gives the user a real-time view and predictability. Traditional software companies can take two years to customize software for a five-year large-scale project. We have the ability to build it in a month or two.
"We believe it's critical in terms of return on investment. If you're building a $3-billion power plant and it's costing $1-million a day from time to first power, if we can reduce that by three months or 10 per cent, that's a good outcome. Metrics are hard to capture on projects of that size, but we can describe the problems and how we solve them. That's how we sell."
Vince Gilbert, chief knowledge officer at Excel Services Corporation, a nuclear consulting company, in Rockville, Md., agrees that Coreworx gives the nuclear industry real-time visibility on projects.
As a former shift manager at Pennsylvania's Peach Bottom Nuclear Power Plant in the 1990s, Mr. Gilbert looked after 1.5-million square feet of plant, 40,000 valves, 20,000 instruments, 17,000 procedures and 10,000 pieces of equipment.
"A nuclear plant is one of the most complex things to operate," he says. "And the new ones are even more complex."
He said the average large-scale nuclear project is roughly 40 per cent over budget and 40 per cent over schedule, but the sophisticated tools that Coreworx provides substantially better odds.
"The outcome without using sophisticated tools is unacceptable," he says, pointing to the Olkiluoto power pant in Finland, which has suffered numerous delays and cost overruns, as an example. "It's 50 per cent over budget and 37 months behind schedule after 42 months of work. Having looked at lessons learned for that plant ... Those problems are not anticipated with any company using the Coreworx product because it has specific features that allow contractors to talk to each other as part of the project plan. It's a feature I've never seen before in any other products."
There are currently 450 nuclear reactors in service and 40 under construction across the globe; four plants are scheduled to be built in the United States, and another 28 are at the proposal stage with the regulator. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that by 2030 there may be as many as 1,400 reactors operating worldwide. The future looks bright for Coreworx.
"This is a tremendous capital infusion into extremely large projects," Mr. Gilbert says. "The need for state-of-the-art tools is paramount."
Shawna Richer is an editor in Report on Business. She also writes about small businesses that are doing interesting things with technology. sricher@globeandmail.com