Mike Wilson, the Head of Risk and Principle for Prima Uno Limited, joined us for the 2020 Online Safran User Conference. He spoke to us about shifting from using Oracle Primavera Risk Analyser (PRA) to Safran Risk for his customer's cost and schedule risk analysis.
Mike's extensive experience in risk management, project controls, and project management makes his talk a must-watch:
A Need For a Smarter Solution
For years, Prima Uno primarily used Oracle PRA for integrated cost and schedule risk analysis. However, during the tail-end of 2016, they experienced a spike in demand for their risk analysis services. This growth in interest led the company to seek out a more efficient risk analysis tool for several reasons:
- A lack of development in Oracle PRA
- Increased demand from customers for better risk analysis outputs
- A need for faster turnaround times with consistent outputs and less interpretation
- Insistence from customers for more mature risk management and risk analysis
- A growing lack of confidence in the analytical results achieved with PRA, and difficulty in interpreting these.
Why Safran Risk?
After exploring the market, Prima Uno settled on Safran Risk because:
- It's based around an easy-to-use, time-saving risk process
- It includes a full embedded scheduler - essential for in-depth scenario and option management
- It considers all aspects of integrated risk: uncertainty, risk drivers, and their impact on duration and cost
- It offers sensitivity analysis
- It needs less interpretation of results, as results are easily explained in the reporting
Since working with Safran, Mike has also been glad to have chosen Safran Risk because of the continued development of the product and Safran's outstanding customer service:
"I fire in an email to support and they get back to me in a timely manner. Also, the fact that there's a roadmap and the product's being constantly developed is music to my ears."
Safran Risk in Action
One of Prima Uno's clients was planning to undertake a £100m waste repository closure project – a first of its kind in the UK. The project involved closing down the waste repository while maintaining the integrity of the thousands of containers of low-level nuclear waste stored there.
To complete the project successfully, the client had to overcome several challenges. There was a considerable amount of regulatory interest in the project. On top of that, the technical solutions required for safely closing the vault weren't set in stone at the project's outset. The project was also publicly-funded, so providing accurate cost and schedule estimates was imperative.
At the outset, the team at Prima Uno were handed a contract schedule deemed too high-level for risk analysis and a working level schedule that was too detailed and not fully costed. To combat this, they imported the contract schedule into Safran Risk and modified it to better represent how risks would impact the schedule. Thanks to the built-in capabilities of Safran Risk, Prima Uno could work with the team in real-time to make adjustments, lessening the reliance on the project planner.
With Safran Risk's ability to deliver sensitivity analysis, Mike and the team could sit together and, using real-time results to refine inputs, obtain credible outputs. This allowed everyone to understand the areas of significant risk exposure in a way that simply wasn't possible before with Oracle PRA.
"This has revolutionised how I undertake risk analysis. I used to go back and forth to the team in a very transactional manner. We used to spend more time trying to understand and interpret if what Oracle PRA was telling us is what we think it is. Within the first couple of uses of Safran Risk, I cut that time to less than half. It was unbelievable – there was no going back."
