What are the costs of your project inefficiencies?

A common project execution workflow starts with the corporate or regional office scheduling and dispatching its field staff. The field staff execute on field tests, project specifications, observations and/or inspections while collecting and transporting necessary samples to a lab. Lab techs collect and enter lab results that go to a project engineer or Quality Assurance/Quality Control review process, and then out for final delivery of the results and reports to the client.

Poorly Supported Workflow

But today, workflows for field and associated lab operations in construction are generally supported by disparate, non-integrated systems. These systems often require the use of manual forms or spreadsheets or PDFs to capture and document work performed.

This situation causes serious deficiencies in the ability to communicate necessary information in a timely manner to all roles performing daily tasks across projects. Field and back office staff often rely on email, phone calls, or text messages as the only communication options.

Likewise, users are required to access multiple systems to perform and document their work. There is almost no opportunity to manage work efficiently which has significant and expensive consequences. Especially, in the areas that impact profitability—mainly safety, rework, and risk.

Inefficiencies that Impact your Profitability

The following are just a few of the many examples of inefficiencies that impact your profitability, yet most organizations are unaware of the cost or they believe it’s just not that costly to them. Our challenge to them: “Go ahead- Quantify it!”

• Duplicate data entry—re-entering form and report data is labor intensive and can be error prone.
• Missing project and/or contact information—spending a significant time in emails and phone calls repeating basic project information is a waste of time.
• Manual sample/test tracking—lost, misplaced or mislabeled samples can cause unnecessary and costly re-work.
• Ad hoc scheduling requests—disconnected scheduling tools can result in a time-consuming effort to get the right person with the right certification to the right job.
• Untimely or missing notifications to field techs—lack of visibility to into scheduling and dispatching resources can hinder getting field techs to the project site on time.
• Unplanned project scope changes—unanticipated work that comes up in the field can throw off your project delivery schedule and budget.

You Can Calculate the Cost

This calculator is a starting point to help you quantify the cost of project inefficiencies and where they occur. But there are many other areas of your processes and projects—scheduling, project management, quality assurance, safety, and billing—that can drive up the cost of your inefficiencies. We can help you to identify, measure, and quantify these and the many more areas of inefficiencies and costs. Our ultimate goal is to help you to create a set of best practices for efficient workflows that will help you to achieve process and project efficiency and maximize your cash flow and revenues. These are real dollar savings that are being spent wastefully.

How We Can Help You

With Agile Frameworks’ MetaField® solution, we help you to identify and solve the inefficiencies in your processes. From initial project definition all the way through delivering work product to your client, there are many processes that can deplete your revenues, your margins and your profits. It’s our job to help you uncover and improve those processes so that you can turn these inefficiencies into real actualized dollars to spend or reinvest into your business’ bottom line.

Want to Learn More?

Learn the best way to become more efficient by defining the cost of your inefficiencies. Check out our calculator by clicking Cash Savings Calculator.