Key Concepts

Job

The core unit of work in OMNI is a Job. A Job is work that is executed by a contracting organization i.e. contractor (the user of OMNI) that has been awarded a contract by a customer. The contract captures the work that the customer would require and the terms and conditions associated with it.

A Job contains the sequence of activities that must be executed by the contractor in order to fullfill the requirements of the client. These sequence of activities form the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of the Job.

These sequence of activities are arranged in a hierarchy, best described through the following diagram:

Client's Requirement

The client (or the owner) has a specific requirements that need to be executed as part of the contract. These terms and conditions are captured in the hierarchy of BOQs. (BOQ : Bill of Quantity). The BOQ hierarchy describes each activity i.e. the quantity and the Unit of Measure used that needs to be executed. Each BOQ may (or may not) have another BOQ as its parent thus creating a Tree of BOQs.

For instance the following BOQs describe a requirement for Earthwork Excavation.

Here the lowest level of BOQs i.e. 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 are the specific client requirements categorized under 1.1 which in turn is categorized under 1.

Execution Activities

Parent Package, Parent Scope Group, Scope Group and Scope represent a set of standardized activities that the contracting organization can execute. This is a library of capabilities that the contractor has, using this library the contractor may execute the activities of a Job.

The Parent Package, Parent Scope Group and Scope Group represents a hierarchy of Scopes that are used to categorize the Scopes appropriately. An example hierarchy of scopes would be:

The hierarchy above represents a set of standardized activities that forms the capabilities of the contracting organization with the Scope being the actual activity that maybe executed in any Job. When a Scope is added to a Job then this becomes a Job Scope.

Thus more generally speaking a Job is a collection of Job Scopes each of which represent the set of activities that the contracting organization must perform in order to fulfill the client's requirements. Each Job Scope is a Scope that maybe categorized in terms of a Parent Package, Parent Scope Group and Scope Group. The client's requirement on the other hand is modeled in terms of BOQs.

Subcontractor Tasks

The 3rd hierarchy of activities relate to those that the Subcontractor must perform. Typically these activities are organized in an hierarchy of two levels Work Group and Work Order Item. Each Work Group consists of one or more Work Order Items.

Subcontractors are in charge of executing Work that are part of a specific Job Scope, thus Job Scopes are broken down into one or more Work Groups. For instance if a Job Scope is “Exterior Painting” - it maybe broken down into 3 Work Groups and Each Work Group further subdivided into Work Order Items.

The Subcontractor Execution Strategy determines the Work Groups and Work Order Items that constitute a Job Scope. These decisions are typically taken at the time of creating the Job Project Plan.