Transmission and distribution project quality assurance and quality control

DNV can act as an owner’s engineer, or project manager objectively assessing contractors’ performance on technical quality assurance and control, budget and schedule.

Large T&D projects are taking place across the world, from replacing and strengthening the grid in regions like the US, Europe and the Middle East, to new developments in Africa.

On any such project, objective assessment of quality can play a vital role. Independent quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) helps you ensure the contractor meets agreed performance levels both for the quality of the work and its timeliness – are milestones being met and is the project on budget?

DNV provides objective support
As an independent party, DNV can act as the owner’s or lender’s engineer or provide QA and QC for T&D projects. Based on the project specifications, we can support project managers:

• before FID (Final Investment Decision) by assisting with final supplier selection
• during execution through QA and QC of contractor performance
  • investigation of possible shortfalls from agreed quality levels, establishing their nature and potential risk to project
  • advise on whether the shortfalls are acceptable or not.

Depending on the size of project, we supply an individual specialist or a team led by a project leader who acts as your single project contact and ensures the appropriate specialists are available exactly when you need them. Importantly, our experts and consultants can both assess the project quality and provide advice on acceptability, replacement or repair when quality or performance falls below contractually agreed levels. This allows you to take decisions based on a sound technical risk analysis.

Deliverables
Depending on the stage of the project, we deliver a range of deliverables. Before the project goes ahead we can supply due diligence reports. These cover the project quality, structure and approach providing important support for financing parties, particularly at FID. We can also provide you with contractor selection reports. These offer an objective opinion, based on the agreed selection criteria for your project and proposals from the potential contractors.

During the project, we can supply objective deviation reports, giving independent feedback and advice on any quality deviations, as well as progress reports. Progress reports provide you with impartial data on quality performance, budget and scheduling of the project. When we act as the lender’s engineer, these can supplied as draw-down reports for project payments to the contractor.