Productivity
|
|
|
|
Productivity Analysis, Development & Control PAR consultants have carried out productivity analysis, development and control projects in several different industries. Chief among these is the shipbuilding industry, in which the process has provided enormous savings. In one case, a shipbuilding subsidiary which was turning over £5.3M per year and losing £5.8M, was turned to a profit of £217k in under one year. From the initial estimating and bid stage right through to the point of settling the account, productivity has a bearing on every aspect of your project and your control of it. Many firms produce estimates for projects without having any real idea of how long a piece of work will take or what it really costs. This inevitably leads either to loss of the contract because the quoted cost is too high, or failure of the project because the work cannot be completed for the quoted cost. Productivity can be affected by many things. Something as apparently minor as a “falling out” between two employees can cause a large dip in productivity, as can excessive unplanned downtime on a large machine. However, it can be difficult to tell what effect these things have unless you know the standard productivity level and have a way of measuring it on a daily or weekly basis. The first step towards knowing and understanding your productivity levels is having an established set of Global Norms. These can even be integrated into a fully automatic estimating package, which PAR consultants can set up for you, using standard software, such as MS Excel.
With these in place and with site-specific criteria taken into account, you can then estimate accurately to within a few man-hours for a given piece of work. This can then be rolled up into a higher level estimate, eventually giving you the total (and reliable) projected labour cost of any project. This fits in perfectly with your project controls system. If your Project Manager is telling you that everything is fine and you see a major dip in productivity, then you know that something is not as it might appear. The onus is then placed on the Project Manager to find out how progress has been reported as up to date, when the productivity report says that it obviously cannot be. Knowing that what you have planned and estimated is actually possible to achieve is the first step in making all of your projects successful. Remember, if you want to be world-class in your industry: Failure is not an option |
|
Send mail to
ewarren@pargroup.co.uk with
questions or comments about this web site.
|
