CAP·PATH · The Capital Project Management Platform + CAP·CORE · The Capital Project Management System
CAP·PATH is the software your capital program runs on, from the five-year plan down to the person who owns one deliverable this week. The gated work process is its spine. Around that spine it carries the portfolio and its cash by year, the scoping requests that bring projects in, the governance forums and their gate decisions, the risk register, every open action, and the lessons that make the next project better. CAP·CORE is the best-practice standard it deploys.
Own the standard. Run it in software.
The problem · where most owner programs are today
Sites run forty projects on one budget cycle with tools that see neither end: the capital plan lives in a spreadsheet, the gate process lives in a binder, the decisions live in minutes nobody reopens, and the lessons live in whoever happened to be there. Four failures hide in that gap.
Seventy rows, a number on each, a color for whether it is going ahead. Nobody can say why a project is funded, which ones ride the same window, or what happens to the year when that window moves.
A binder does not assign the deliverable, date it from the gate, or hold the gate until the accountable person decides on the record. Big projects tolerate it; small ones route around it.
Steering meets, decides, and moves on. Six months later nobody can say what was decided, who decided it, or whether the recycled deliverables ever came back.
A project runs two years; a lessons meeting at the end reconstructs it from fading memory. Actions get minuted, filed, and rediscovered as the same surprise next project.
Plan the portfolio · before any of this
Every project at every site on one timeline, gate to gate, with the turnaround windows they ride. Cost by year with the grant and internal split, cash by month from your own finance export, the standing obligations of the portfolio on a calendar, and a candidate list fed by scoping requests rather than hallway asks. Your existing forecast is imported as it stands, so the first view is your list, not a blank page.
What the year really carries once the turnaround and the projects pinned to it are stacked, which candidates earned their place, and the monthly forecast every project owes.
What it does
It governs what happens, when, who owns it, and what gets approved, then carries the decisions, risks, actions, cash, and lessons that grow around it. The detailed engineering and the construction schedule stay with your engineers and planners.
A project enters through a scoping request the disciplines review before anyone sees a row on the plan.
Anyone can raise one: what you saw and where, why it matters, whether it needs a turnaround window. It routes through the sections your template names, each with a named discipline owner, a lead time, and the option to say not applicable.
When every section is decided, the site’s deciders record one outcome: accept with a stage, class, budget year, sponsor, and project manager; defer to a date; or decline with a reason. Accepting creates the project on the plan.
The complexity calculator scores seven factors and recommends the tier. Nothing is saved until the deploy dialog runs it for real, so it is safe to try on a hypothetical project.
The work process, deployed to a real project with a real team on it, and held to.
Your work process is a versioned template your company controls. Start from the CAP·CORE master, import the gate process you already run, or build one, then edit every activity, role, gate, and offset. No change requests to alter your own standard.
The tier decides which activities deploy. The front end back-calculates from the sanction gate, and on a coupled project from the earlier of the window start and the scope freeze; execution runs forward from the field start. Conditional tracks switch on only when true of the project.
The governing standard, what good looks like, and the date the gate needs it by sit on the step itself. Every activity has a named responsible and a named accountable. A key deliverable keeps the record behind it, closes only on the accountable person’s acceptance against its acceptance test, and a gate closes only through a recorded decision: proceed, recycle, hold, or cancel.
Cost and schedule each carry an Andon lamp. Yellow is an open rated risk against a milestone or the budget. Red is a recorded impact. A lamp is raised, never switched off; it clears when the record behind it closes.
The Drift report shows exactly how a running project diverged from its template, every re-lay included. Promote a change worth keeping into a new version of the company standard in one step.
Weekly and monthly reports computed live from the data date and frozen as numbered PDFs on schedule. Rollups by role, person, and phase; export to Excel; event-driven email that chases for you.
The forums that actually steer a capital program, run as a system rather than a calendar invite.
The portfolio governance body is a monthly series seeded from your own work process, with the portfolio report on its agenda. Steering forums and gate meetings are recurring series with a question-form agenda and a context dashboard built from live data.
Record the room if you want to, and the transcript drafts the minutes. Decisions, actions, and risks are proposed, never assumed: the facilitator accepts, edits, or dismisses each one. Approval freezes the minutes and sends them out.
A gate meeting records its decision as one object bound to the gate row: outcome, conditions, the re-review date on a recycle, who chaired it. The project sponsor chairs the funding gates G1 to G3; the steering chair takes the delivery gates G4 to G6. Superseding a decision requires naming its replacement, so the register can never quietly contradict itself.
An evergreen register with the heartbeat enforced, contingency by estimate class, and cash forecast monthly.
Scoring runs on your own risk matrix, uploaded as it exists today. Risks are written as cause, uncertain event, and effect, filed under the phase they belong to, and the coach helps shape a vague one rather than refusing to save it.
Every risk has one named owner and a review-by date keyed to its severity. Mitigations are real actions in the same spine. A risk that reaches its date untreated forces a recorded acceptance; gates hold for a register pass; a rated risk against a milestone lights the lamp.
Each project owes a monthly estimate at completion and a note on what moved. Cash by month is entered on the project or imported for every active project from your finance export, matched in a preview before anything commits. Late forecasts escalate.
The half of lessons learned that everybody skips: capture during, not after.
One box, on the activity you are standing on, typed or spoken. The project, phase, and category fill themselves in. Attributed by default, anonymous when it needs to be.
A lesson resurfaces on the next project’s copy of the same activity, in front of the person about to do that job. When a lesson echoes one never actioned, the platform says so.
One action spine: gate conditions, meeting commitments, lessons actions, readiness tasks. One named owner. Re-dating needs a recorded reason. Verified is its own state, and the owner cannot verify their own action.
Most capital at a running plant either rides a window or has to stay out of one. The link is a first-class object, not a note.
A project links to the turnaround it executes in, ties into, depends on, or shares scope with. The turnaround manager sees the projects riding their window; the project manager sees the window. One record, two doors, one sign-in.
A project in a window pins its field start to the window’s start. When the turnaround moves, the project re-lays and the revision says why. The front end is back-calculated from the scope freeze, because the tie-ins must be defined before the freeze, not before the outage.
Turnaround cost and project cost stack on one year-by-year view, with linked projects drawn attached to their window. Overlapping preparation windows and the people they share are named before they collide.
Run · the deployed project
The complexity calculator scores the project and recommends the tier. PATH copies your template, lays every activity out from the gates and the field start, and opens the board: named owners, ready-to-start flags, the two lamps. The site team owns its copy, and improvements promote back into the company standard. No vendor change requests.
The accountability rail
Ask the platform
A standard nobody reads is a binder with a login. Every person on the project can ask the platform what a deliverable has to contain, why a gate exists, what an estimate class commits them to, or what their own role owns this month, and get an answer grounded in two things only: your governing standard and your deployed plan.
It is the fastest way a new project manager gets useful, and the reason your standard stops being a document people mean to read.
Where the boundary sits
Keeping it alive
A process only survives if people are reminded of it at the right frequency, and gets abandoned if they are reminded too often. Everyone gets one brief a week: what moved across their projects, and what is theirs in the week ahead. Only approvals waiting, a forecast owed, and anything overdue interrupt the day.
The standard it runs on · CAP·CORE
CAP·CORE is the documented best-practice owner’s system PATH deploys: forty-seven standards from governance and portfolio through front-end definition, planning, execution, commissioning, and closeout, plus the delivery profiles for control-system and business-system projects, and a tiered work process of 156 activities at Major and 16 at replacement in kind. Built on public-framework rigor and tailored to how your site actually works. The master ships in the tool; copy it, adapt it, and make it yours. Or import the gate process you already run and keep your house standard, now live and enforced.
Every gate, full document set, independent review mandatory at sanction.
The full gate structure with condensed deliverables.
Combined definition, weeks of front end, a desk review ahead of sanction.
One combined gate, standard templates, the change screen and the safety review never skipped.
License the management system and its tiered work process, tailored to your sites, nomenclature, funding sources, and approval ladder. Every requirement classed as an interlock, a core practice, or a stretch, so tailoring is honest rather than silent.
A hands-on engagement to stand the system up and make it stick: load the portfolio, deploy the work process on the live projects, set the gate calendar and the accountability, seed the portfolio forum, and coach your people to run it without us.
At a glance
Built on public frameworks (AACE, CII front-end planning practice, PMI, DCMA, and GAO) · tailored to your site, never a shrink-wrapped download
Why us
CAP·PATH runs on the same spine as our assurance reviews, and as the sister platform for turnarounds, so the state of the work process, an independent read of the package, and the window the project rides sit on one record, not in three disconnected systems. That is the seam no closed tool can offer.
What you get
The standard and the acceptance test on every activity, named accountability, key deliverables with the record behind them, recorded gate decisions with four outcomes, a decision register with revisit dates, a risk register with a review heartbeat, monthly cash forecasting, one action spine, and an append-only audit trail. The portfolio with cost by year, the scoping-request front door, the monthly portfolio report, Excel export, the coach, and one weekly brief keep the whole program moving. Your team works in the CAP·PATH client portal; we work beside you in the same system.
Deployable now, consultant-led. CAP·CORE is delivered as a tailored engagement; CAP·PATH runs it as the software you own.
What changes
Your guide
CAP Intelligence is an independent assurance practice built from the owner’s side, across refining, petrochemicals, industrial gas, LNG, and power, as the owner accountable for the capital outcome and as the consultant brought in to protect it. It is the capital-projects practice of STO Intelligence LLC, and shares one spine with its turnaround practice.
Our methods stay at public-framework level, AACE, CII front-end planning practice, PMI, DCMA, and GAO, so every finding is defensible and nothing is a black box. You own the standard, not a proprietary score you cannot see inside.
Why CAP Intelligence
Empathy for the seat you are in, running a capital program on a process that lives in a binder and a few senior people’s heads. Authority to fix it: we wrote the standard, built the platform that runs it, and assure it independently on the same record.
Show us how you run projects today. We will stand up your standard in CAP·PATH, import your capital forecast, and walk your team through their first deployed project.