The initial Front End Engineering & Design activities of a project are performed to determine its feasibility and to develop the initial project cost estimates. For usually six months or more, determined by the plant complexities, ABB would expect to provide experienced technical and support staff that would become integrated into the customer project management team.
During the FEED phase the ABB team, in conjunction with the customer, develops a detailed responsibility matrices to show who is responsible for what, assists with specifying the elements of the system, importantly including safety etc, and provides input into the overall estimate to determine the initial budget covering all phases of the project.