A procurement work package is the record of all material required to execute one construction work package, held as data in the procurement database, the material management system and the Level 3 schedule. Its purpose is to measure material readiness against the required-on-site date of the CWP it feeds.
A PWP lives in the data. It is the set of purchase orders, line items, vendor records and delivery dates that carry the same CWP code, so that a planner can ask one question, whether the material for this package will be on site when the crews are, and get one answer.
One Package for One CWP
The preferred sequence in the schedule is EWP, then PWP, then CWP, with one-to-one relationships between them. The PWP list is developed after the approved CWP list comes out of the path of construction, and the PWP release plan is baselined with the rest of the schedule. Procurement is driven by the material take-offs issued with each EWP, so engineering carries the responsibility of keeping EWPs and CWPs aligned. Where a deviation from one-to-one is justified, it goes through change management and lands in the AWP Matrix before any system is updated.
Dates That Mean Something
| Field | Definition |
|---|---|
| Planned start | The date the first purchase order for the package is issued |
| Planned finish | The date 100 percent of the package's material has been received at site |
| Duration | The procurement cycle needed to deliver the last component |
| Progress | Components received at site over components required |
Finish means receipt at site by the purchasing organization, with receiving reports complete and the purchase order closed. A package that is 95 percent received is a package the crew cannot start.
One Line Item Supports One CWP
A PWP may draw on several purchase orders, and one purchase order may carry line items for several packages. The granularity that holds everything together is that one purchase order line item supports exactly one CWP, even when similar commodities are bought under common orders for economies of scale. Once orders are placed, every order and line item is associated with its PWP and CWP, so the supplier's forecast delivery date can be compared with the CWP's ROS date.
Expedite by ROS Date
Expediting is prioritized by CWP required-on-site date, and that expectation is set with suppliers when the order is placed. The PWP Skyline in the 8 week lookahead shows planned, forecast and actual PWP status against the ROS dates, so delivery slippage is visible before it becomes a field constraint. A material status report keeps the parent purchase order items and the vendor's child components together, with traceability from purchase order to vendor bill of material to tag to PWP to CWP.
Bills of Material Come from the Model
Engineering bills of material are generated from the 3D model, and non-modeled material is brought in through supplementary take-offs so that modeled and non-modeled quantities consolidate into one bill. Bulk material is associated with its EWP and PWP, and every unique identifier in the material system is assigned to one or more CWPs before the CWP starts. The Secondary MTO is where the non-modeled material lives as data.
Readiness measured this way is what material readiness means in practice, and the PWP data stays in the owner's material system and warehouse after the project. AWPBI's materials management service sets up the PWP structure and the reporting that tracks it.