University of Twente Student Theses
Assisting the management team of Frijns Structural Steel in order to develop a tool to gain more control over the projects and the production in the company
Noord, N. van (2016) Assisting the management team of Frijns Structural Steel in order to develop a tool to gain more control over the projects and the production in the company.
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| Abstract: | Frijns Structural Steel W.L.L. is an originally Dutch structural steel company where Rob Frijns is owner and managing director. The company has rapidly grown over the past years, it started in Qatar in 2006 with a few people and nowadays it has almost 500 employees. The internship was done in a time span of 5 months (August 2015 to January 2016). During these months my main focus was on the assisting the management team in order to gain more insight and control over the projects and production in the company. The rapid development of the company and the lack of an ERP-system resulted in a lacking information system. It is hard to collect the right information and report in a proper manner. The first step in the internship was interviewing the different departments to know how the company is organized and how the different departments work together. Of course, the production process is known in this way as well. Out of the interviews an overview of all information and communication interfaces is made, this is used to identify improvement potentials in the internal organization. Since steel construction companies are project oriented, there is always a sort of matrix organization. There is a functional axis, in which all the departments are represented, more related to the production process. The second axis is based the projects on which Frijns is working, where each project is related to all the departments. To learn more about the projects I have studied together with the contract administrator the contracts between Frijns and their clients. The contract with a client is a sort of guide line for the entire project. Together with this colleague a set of parameters is defined out of the contract, which can be used to control the project. This resulted in a contract intake form, which can be a helpful tool for the project managers to summarize a contract when a new project will start. Now the company is known and the structure of steel construction project is known, so there can be worked on the main object of the internship; the assistance of the management team to gain insight and control. A project dashboard is designed, from the management point of view. Here all the information the management would like to know is shown together. The next step was designing a system, such that the right information would be collected in the company, without having the purpose to build a complete ERP-system. This is done by setting up a new format for Interim Payment Applications; this is a monthly progress report which translates the physical progress of a project into a monetary value which can be invoiced. For several project these IPAs are made and in this way the project information is gathered in a central place. By the end of the internship it was proven that the right information could be collected through some relative easy tools. The dashboard could be updated using this information, providing the management the right information. Though the system created is a simple Excel-based structure, which is not an alternative for an ERP-system. Besides this main project, several other projects are done as well. These are among other things a first step in building a quality assurance system for the quality department. Helping the procurement department to define a business controlled purchase flowchart. Assisting the site team to create an overview of the needed man power capacities. And helping out project managers in some situation, when they need assistance. |
| Item Type: | Internship Report (Master) |
| Clients: | Frijns Qatar, Qatar |
| Faculty: | ET: Engineering Technology |
| Subject: | 52 mechanical engineering |
| Programme: | Mechanical Engineering MSc (60439) |
| Keywords: | Project management, production management, financial management, steel construction, project organisation |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/69801 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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