ECI and McKinsey facilitated a roundtable of owner operators in the engineering construction sector which was hosted at Shell’s headquarters in The Hague. Capital efficiency and the need to work together better as a sector to address it remains the number one issue for clients. Compared with ECI’s report 2-3 years previously, issues identified included: the crisis led to incremental improvement but not transformational change; competition for capital has increased while project performance has not; industry-level standardisation could eliminate a lot of waste but remains elusive; banks assert more control and drive risk further down the supply chain, increasing cost; and many companies still fail to capture lessons learned and transfer knowledge to new projects. The discussion identified a number of familiar themes for improvement, which require articulation of a clear road map to go from today to a different way of working, which would feature more collaborative contracting/alliances, harnessing the full power of innovation and digital technology to enable structural transformation of how projects are delivered, and sector-level standardisation of processes and requirements. A summary report is available here. You can view the presentations here.