Controlling project management at BNFL

For the past year, BNFL Engineering has been project managing the £400million Sellafield Drypac Plant (SDP) for its parent company. The plant will allow BNFL to treat intermediate level waste for future long term storage. and is a flagship project for its engineering arm.

To help manage the complexity of such a major project, BNFL Engineering is making use of a project management and document control system from Manchester-based International Computer Engineering (ICE). Called icePAC, the system is a modular package that has been designed to grow from simple document management to a company-wide project administration and control system.

According to John Turnbull, BNFL's project manager, 'icePAC has replaced numerous MS Access databases and the functionality of the databases has increased. We are looking forward to combining all the project databases into one. The value of a single database is immense and icePAC has significantly contributed to reducing front-end design costs.'

Two years into the project, the system has references to 80 000 documents with 500 000 anticipated at the end of the project in 2001. The openness of icePAC's architecture, says ICE, and the array of Oracle tools available, allows other relevant existing packages to be integrated into the total project system.