ITER global energy project powered by Oracle Primavera Cloud
Advancing science and preparing the way for the fusion power plants of tomorrow keeps on schedule with Oracle Primavera Cloud.
France | Construction and Engineering
“We’re big, complex, and we’re pushing boundaries to bring clean, plentiful energy to the world while overcoming cultural and political differences. Oracle Primavera Cloud helps us orchestrate our planning and scheduling so thousands of contributors can work from a shared, trusted plan. ”
ITER is one of the world’s most ambitious energy projects. Located in southern France, 33 nations including the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, Japan, and Korea are building the world's largest magnetic fusion device designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale, carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers the sun. Initially launching construction in 2007, the collaboration to build and operate the ITER experimental device never had a single, unified planning and scheduling solution to coordinate and inform the thousands of global participants in real time.
Considering the project’s rigorous timeline—the long-term, multiphase construction and assembly effort will extend into the 2030s, ultimately leading to first plasma—ITER leaders sought a planning and scheduling platform that could handle the massive scope of a construction project that will house a 23,000-ton piece of nuclear fusion equipment that literally demands perfection down to 10% of the size of a hair. Given the challenges of keeping multiple countries and disciplines coordinated, ITER recognized that dated manual processes, including inefficient imports and exports of project data and other information across multiple systems, could no longer be the norm.
ITER spent months evaluating options to upgrade its processes and supporting technology. They selected Oracle Primavera Cloud not just for its superior planning and scheduling capabilities, which share the same pedigree as Oracle Primavera P6, but also for its value in forecasting resource capacity and demand across the life of the entire ITER program. ITER quickly put Primavera Cloud at the center of all scheduling activities, bridging language barriers and giving stakeholders immediate and complete access to project schedules and information. The data migration from Primavera P6 involved four separate schedules, 30 projects that included 126,000 activities, and shored up thousands of external relationships across critical activities, all while onboarding 700 users without disruptions in reporting monthly KPIs and overall program earned value metrics.