• case study
• improvement
• mappatura
• ottimizzazione
• service

This internship has been carried out at Quest Global Engineering, a diversified global engineering services company founded in 1997. Quest’s Florence Office is mainly focused on Oil&Gas industry, offering a wide assortment of services spacing from structural analysis to piping, passing through to machinery control system.
In particular, this internship was centered on the “Model Test” process, especially about aspect like mapping, error analysis and process improvements.
First part of the work is based on the identification of Quest’s business model, analyzing the global company in terms of organization, clients and competitors. Then, keeping in mind the global structure, has been analyzed the Italian Business Unit in the same terms. At this time, was possible to characterize the processes involved in a generic order, therefore the generic process has been tailored for the specific “Model Test” case, mapping all activities entangled in the Model Test starting from Quotation, passing through Execution and finishing with Closing activity. Having understood how Model Test works allowed performing a first, aggregate control of the process in order to discover major criticalities, caused both from external to internal factors: criticalities have been ordered by priority and possibility of direct corrective actions. Results of analysis was that most important errors with possibility to perform corrective actions were bounded to causes linked to execution process: it was necessary to make a deeper analysis about that.
Second part of the internship was mainly based on mapping operational activities. First step was creating a map concerning to the execution process, in order to have a global vision about the process. As results, were recognized eight main activities, starting from a preliminary 2D Study, passing through 3D modeling and balancing analysis and finishing with an Assembly document. So, every activities have been mapped, creating a procedure document, a flowchart and a checklist in order to retrace the documentation flow and providing the lack of documentation. At this level of detail, was possible to perform a more accurate analysis concerning to the nature of errors occurred during Model Test.
In fact, the last part of the work was based on the analysis of the human errors. Human errors have been divided in three categories, first based on consequences for the customer and then based on the causes of the errors. Results of this analysis was that the most part of errors occurred during Model test were committed in the 3D modeling activity, caused by lapse and slip errors. Corrective action were set up by particular checklists and another procedure for the review. Performance of corrective actions have been evaluated by assessment in terms of time saving and quality improvements, underline the differences between as-is and to-be scenario.