Inspired by the successful project delivery approach for infrastructure for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, which came in on time, under budget and without a fatality, the National’s procurement staff Renewable Energy Laboratory thought they could apply a new idea of their own. .
The needs of the U.S. Department of Energy research agency, based in Golden, Colo., are very different from those of the $10 billion global sporting event that drew thousands of participants and attendees . But Brittany Decker, director of acquisition services at NREL, says her procurement experts saw commonalities with the complexity of the Olympics project and its goals related to safety, sustainability and partnership.
“It kind of touched on all the things that NREL cares about,” he says.
After pitching the idea to DOE officials, lab staff worked with them to come up with a way to implement the model. They called the result the “cooperative construction procurement approach,” or CCCA.
NREL awarded its first contract under the approach last month to a design-build team from JE Dunn Construction Co. and SmithGroup.
The delivery method is based on a construction design approach based on past performance that NREL had piloted and evolved over time, says Bret Cummock, who directs the agency’s capital investment program. With the new approach, the agency aims to expand contracts to cover multiple projects and speed up time, while leveraging the knowledge the contractor acquires over the course of the job.
Each year, the contractor’s staff “work with us, they get to know us better and better,” Cummock says. “They understand our safety culture, our partnership culture, what we want and what we prioritize as a lab.”
The intent is for the approach to be more of an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract from a single source, Decker says. The contractor would be a collaborative partner of NREL’s project planning team.
“We don’t pre-engineer the building, we really give it to our partner to … come up with unique and innovative design solutions for our research needs,” he says. “This allows us to really embrace this idea of partnership and move away from the more traditional oversight role.”
The CCCA prime contractor must also have mentor protection agreements with at least two small businesses. Decker says NREL hopes to be able to develop relationships with those smaller contractors for jobs that aren’t large enough to qualify under a prime contract.
According to Cummock, projects at NREL’s research facilities often rely on electrical or mechanical equipment with longer lead times, between one and three years in some cases. By partnering with a contractor on a work portfolio, the agency aims to keep CCCA contractors working on other task orders, reduce demobilization and remobilization costs, and deliver multiple projects more efficiently in a compressed timeframe .
To attract large and experienced prime contractors, NREL plans to include a “flagship project” in each contract. For the first recently signed with JE Dunn and SmithGroup, this flagship is the $224 million scale Materials and Energy Processing facility at the lab’s Golden Campus. The companies’ contract is capped at five years and $500 million, according to records.
Decker says NREL staff were generally “enthusiastic” about the contractors who submitted the contract, though he acknowledges that the new way of delivering the project may have been “scary for some of our companies” and reduced the number of bidders.
“Hopefully, by showing that CCCA can be successful and effective, we can change that in the future,” he says.
