It’s one thing to be able to say you are successful and a completely different one to be able to show measurable results.
Milad Abedi, Director of Sales and Project Engineer at Milani Construction believes that measurable goals are important for everyone, and a metric tied to financial success often provides a common language that both office and field can understand and agree on. And often, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
“Success in the field directly translates to success in the office; they're one and the same,” says Abedi. “Through my experience, when the crew knows what they're shooting for, they usually get there. They need to have a clearly defined perspective. For example, our company's policy is that if you meet your budget for a certain number of days, you get lunch on a Friday. So the field’s production planners are important. That way, the crew keeps an eye on their performance because it means something to them.”
What is the Production Planner?
Beyond a simple understanding of how today went, with daily time card entries and diaries, the Production Planner, in HeavyJob, allows field users, project managers, or engineers to plan out their days and weeks, ahead of time, to make sure the budget is being met on a regular basis. It also provides tools to get back on track if the current plan is off track.
Abedi describes life before Milani used the Production Planner as cumbersome, especially when trying to keep track of the paperwork involved when tracking down lost time and lost money.
“It was a big deal to use Production Planner,” says Abedi. “There were a couple of negative experiences where we didn't find out soon enough, and we didn't communicate to the crew on a daily basis what they needed to be doing. That resulted in some financial loss on particular operations.”
“We noticed that one of our operations was losing money: It was not meeting their budget, and as we monitored it, the problem kept getting worse. One of the actions we decided to take was to have a morning meeting to directly communicate to the crew how much of that work they are supposed to be doing.”
Faster Budget Insights
After implementing Production Planners, Abedi says they have experienced better communication, internally. This simple tool allows them to now respond to financial monetary losses very quickly. Usually, by the next day or the day of, they can notice something's wrong, rather than months down the line when a loss could be thousands of dollars.
“I would say, the most important part is giving people a goal to shoot for,” says Abedi. “I've seen that sometimes having production plans also helps to plan the day because the cost codes tell people what they need to do, so if there is something that they’ve forgotten to do like adjusting a manhole to the top, and as they see the cost code in the production planner, it reminds them that is also part of the work.”
From a management side, Abedi says that HeavyJob’s Production Plans also give them perspective on how effectively job setups are being used in the field.
Getting Down to Job-Activity Details
“As we go forward when we observe the field, and we see the production planner, we can decide if we need to break down our activities a little more to define cost codes more or not,” says Abedi. “Rather than doing it in hindsight. It's a way to get your hands into the nitty-gritty of the field.”
An example Abedi gave of this is discovering that a cost code they were using didn't account for extra cost when digging for a utility.
“We kept track of our production by putting in our production planner and monitoring cost,” says Abedi. “We noticed that we needed separate cost codes for when you're going to test in an asphalt area versus when you're doing it in a grass area. The cost was almost double, and that was communicated back to our estimating team. Things of that nature that we notice are important to communicate, especially in our line of work where items of work repeat themselves, like the installation of a storm pipe. Things change a little bit, but as it keeps repeating itself, one project can inform the other.”
As with most things you want to quantify as successful, Abedi believes that it is a process that takes time and a strong sense of accountability across the board. With the use of Production Plans at Milani Construction, communication is better, processes have an opportunity to improve, and success is made possible as a result of thoughtful planning and decisions made with data to back them up.
Learn More
Please click on the following link to help you better understand how to use the Production Planner in the field.
