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How to Measure Productivity & Why It's Important
May 23, 2019
The discussion of a two trillion-dollar infrastructure bill has been making headlines. At the same time, there is still talk of a slowdown in the economy related to the impact of Chinese tariffs on the AEC industry. So, are you planning? Are you ready for a boom or slowdown? In AEC, we are always looking for options to increase employee productivity to take on more work without increasing cost or impacting profitability. Often, firms look outside of their organization to satisfy these goals in the form of new projects and more work. As long as we have revenue, that will cover our inefficiencies or wasted resources. In retail there is an old saying, “you can’t take revenue to the bank, only margins.” Welcome to the new reality in AEC regardless if the economy booms or busts.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a demand or need to reduce costs by 20% while taking on more business? If so, consider making a course correction and attacking the obvious and expensive activity in your business—Productivity.
In AEC, we can no longer cover up poor productivity with more billings while overtime costs increase, and poor and costly internal process continue. Now is the time to take action before the economy changes.
So, how do you do it? Where do you start? How do you know what to fix? How do you measure how mature and efficient your productivity is today? It starts with measuring your productivity against your process using Agile Frameworks' Productivity Maturity Model. This model helps firms to identify, measure, and quantify areas of inefficiencies and costs.
The ultimate goal is to help organizations to create a set of best practices for efficient workflows that will help them to achieve process and project efficiency and maximize their cash flow and revenues. These represent opportunities for significant bottom-line savings.
After working with nearly fifty customers to determine their productivity maturity, it became obvious that even the biggest and best performers in AEC still have inefficient process within the organization. In fact, many of these top performing firms have never measured their productivity in key areas.
Whether it is a $10B or a $10M AEC firm, identifying inefficiencies and measuring those inefficiencies isn’t rocket science. The science is in determining how to drive out positive measurable results immediately.
In a recent example, an AEC firm recovered 2,306 annual hours from their inefficient processes. Samples of their savings included taking 307 hours out of their scheduling chaos, recovering 720 hours of incorrect time entry, and saving 235 hours getting project information.
These recovered hours saved $11,000 in scheduling, $18,700 in time entry and correct billing, and $10,400 in critical project information being verifiable and complete ahead of the work. Not bad results and these were the immediate returns.
Agile Frameworks helps you to unlock data that will help solve for the inefficiencies in your processes to realize increased cash flow and operating profits quickly. This calculator is a starting point to identify areas of lost revenue and quantify the cost savings of your project and process inefficiencies. Go to Calculator >