Front-end loading

Article summary

Front-end loading (FEL), also referred to as Front-End Engineering Design (FEED), Front End Planning (FEP), pre-project planning (PPP), and early project planning, is the process for conceptual development of projects in processing industries such as upstream oil and gas, petrochemical, natural gas refining, extractive metallurgy, waste-to-energy, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. This involves developing sufficient strategic information with which owners can address risk and make decisions to commit resources in order to maximize the potential for success. Front-end loading includes robust planning and design early in a project's lifecycle (i.e., the front end of a project), at a time when the ability to influence changes in design is relatively high and the cost to make those changes is relatively low. It typically applies to industries with highly capital intensive, long lifecycle projects (i.e., hundreds of millions or billions of dollars over several years before any revenue is produced). Although it often adds a small amount of time and cost to the early portion of a project, these factors are minor compared to the alternative of the costs and effort required to make changes at a later stage in the project.…

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