Mine Process-Plant Expansion: Disruption, Delay & Acceleration
The Challenge
The self-perform contractor was executing the process-plant expansion scope at an operating mine, working directly for the owner. Through the work the sequence was repeatedly interrupted: owner-directed changes, out-of-sequence direction, trade-stacking, and stop-start mobilizations, layered with acceleration pressure. The impacts accumulated as productivity loss across the work fronts, which a conventional two-snapshot CPM analysis does not capture on its own.
The job ended at partial completion. That raised the evidentiary bar: with no completed as-built to point to, the claim had to be proved from the contemporaneous record, event by event.
How the Analysis Was Built
Working in-house for the self-perform contractor, CPP’s principal built a contractor-side disruption, delay and acceleration analysis on the contemporaneous project record. The work used an as-planned-versus-as-built comparison with an event-by-event impacted baseline and cumulative carry-through, chosen so that contractor-caused and owner-caused impacts could be separated cleanly across the life of the job. Method selection followed the record: with the work ending mid-course and no completed as-built, the selection factors in AACE RP 29R-03 point to an event-based approach rather than a windows analysis.
- Established the as-planned baseline from the tender-stage schedule and reconstructed the as-built from the contemporaneous record
- Identified and characterized each discrete delay and disruption event across successive forensic passes
- Built an event-by-event impacted baseline, carrying each event's effect forward cumulatively so downstream impact was neither lost nor double-counted
- Separated contractor-responsible from owner-responsible impact at each event, rather than presenting a single undifferentiated number
- Ingested and threaded the correspondence record (emails, RFIs, change directives, daily logs) to tie each event to its documentary trigger
- Quantified the disruption and acceleration exposure, with the productivity-loss component measured against unimpacted reference work
- Assembled a quantified, exhibit-backed position paper: delay register, cause-and-effect Gantt charts, and Primavera P6 XER files formatted for direct import
Tools Deployed
The Outcome
The contractor's leadership received a quantified, exhibit-backed position paper in which every impact was tied to the contemporaneous record and separated by responsibility. That record became a structured claim: named events, a documented cause for each, and a defensible basis for the time and cost consequences.
Because the impact was carried through cumulatively rather than assessed one snapshot at a time, the analysis held together on a job that ended mid-course, where a completed as-built was never going to exist.
The Result
Status: confidential. The position paper was delivered to the contractor's leadership. The specific quantum and the current status of the matter are confidential.
Productivity loss you can't pin down?
If a project is bleeding hours and no one has yet tied the losses to specific causative events, that's exactly the work this method was built for, on either side of the dispute. A preliminary assessment capped in writing, turned around in days, not weeks. No hourly burn.
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