Assurance built from the owner’s side of the table.
A standard you can read, not a black box you rent.

CAP Intelligence is the capital-projects practice of STO Intelligence LLC. It grew out of a turnaround assurance practice, because at a running plant the two disciplines were never really separate: most of the capital a site spends either rides a turnaround window or has to be kept out of one, and the same owner-side questions, is the scope defined, is the estimate honest, is the schedule real, is the team aligned, decide the outcome of both.

The practice was built on the owner’s side. The people behind it have held the seats that answer for capital outcomes, at the site and at group level, and have sat across the table as the consultant brought in to protect them. That experience runs through refining, chemicals and petrochemicals, industrial gas, LNG, and power, and it is the reason the method is what it is: a documented standard tiered so a replacement in kind and a major project each get the depth they deserve, a platform the client runs rather than rents, and an independent read at the gate that is an input to the decision and never the decision itself.

The pattern that started the practice is consistent: the information that would have changed a sanction decision was usually knowable in advance. It just was not surfaced in time, or was not measured against an honest standard, or was buried in a group session where the sponsor and the construction manager did not disagree out loud. The Capital Project Assurance Review (CAP·AR) exists to close that gap, and the method and the standard hold the same whatever the unit, the tier, or the industry.

We serve the part of the market the megaproject evaluators do not: site sustaining capital and small-project portfolios at mid-market operators, where the discipline is thinnest, the list lives in a spreadsheet, and a right-sized gated process pays back fastest.

The practice is led by the same team that runs STO Intelligence. A dedicated front-of-house lead for CAP Intelligence will be introduced here when that seat is filled.

The Capital Project Management System (CAP·CORE) is forty-seven documents across governance and portfolio, front-end definition, planning and readiness, execution and construction, commissioning and startup, closeout, and the delivery profiles for control-system and business-system projects. It was written clean-room on public frameworks and our own practice, and it was put in front of an external panel of owner-side, contractor-side, and corporate-capital practitioners before it was called a standard.

Every requirement in it is classed as an interlock, a core practice, or a stretch, so a site adopting it knows exactly what it may tailor and what it may not. Every metric has one definition. Every gate has one decision with four outcomes. That discipline is what lets the platform read conformance honestly, and what lets a review score a project against the standard rather than against a consultant’s mood.