Front End Engineering Design (FEED) for Large Industrial Projects: FEED Maturity and Its Impact on Project Cost and Schedule Performance

Assessing the accuracy of front end engineering design (FEED) for large industrial projects is a critical task with the potential to considerably impact overall project success. At this early phase of the project, the owner's expectation is to be able to make informed decisions including cost predictions to determine whether the project should proceed to the next phase. The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate FEED accuracy and measure its impact on project cost performance. The authors collected and analyzed data from 33 completed large industrial projects representing over $8.83 billions of total installed cost. A primary finding is that projects with high FEED accuracy significantly outperformed projects with low FEED accuracy in terms of cost growth in relation to the approved budget at Phase Gate 3. This finding assists owners and contractors focusing on the front end planning phases of their large industrial projects to considerably improve cost performance.