FIDIC Yellow & Silver Books: Design-Build and EPC Risk Training Course

The FIDIC Yellow & Silver Books: Design-Build and EPC Risk Training Course equips employers, contractors, and their advisers to understand and manage the transfer of risk that occurs when design responsibility moves to the contractor. Rather than surveying the FIDIC suite as a whole, the course concentrates on how risk is allocated in design-build and EPC/turnkey contracting, and on the practical choice between the Yellow Book, the Silver Book, and a more traditional route for power, water, industrial, and infrastructure projects across the Gulf and Africa. It starts from a simple point: a design-build or EPC contract does not remove risk, it moves it, and a party that accepts risk it cannot price or control often pays for that decision later in the form of disputes, delay, or poor plant performance. Participants compare the two books side by side. On the Yellow Book, they examine the Employer's Requirements, the Contractor's design duty and fitness for purpose, the Engineer's role in reviewing Contractor's Documents, and the Contractor's entitlement for Unforeseeable physical conditions and for certain errors in the Employer's Requirements. On the Silver Book, they study the absence of an Engineer, the Employer's Representative, the Contractor's wider responsibility for data and for the accuracy of the Employer's Requirements, the Contractor's assumption of ground risk, and the conditions FIDIC itself sets out for when this form is suitable. The course then follows the risk through delivery. It covers design management and review, the lump sum price and schedules of payment, design and scope changes, testing on completion, tests after completion, performance guarantees and performance damages, defects liability, professional indemnity and other insurances, limits of liability, and the treatment of decennial liability where the governing law provides for it. Tender-stage pricing of risk, contingency, the effect of short tender periods, and back-to-back arrangements with designers and key suppliers are examined from both the employer's and the contractor's points of view. Participants also see how amendments to the published forms can alter this picture, so that a contract labelled as Yellow may in practice carry much of the risk of a Silver Book, and they learn to read the combined effect of those changes before they price or award. The course is delivered through project case studies, risk allocation exercises, Employer's Requirements reviews, a contract selection simulation, and a final workshop. Participants leave with a Yellow and Silver Book comparison matrix, a design-risk register, an Employer's Requirements review checklist, a contract selection framework, and a risk allocation plan they can adapt to their own design-build or EPC projects.