The Holloway Consulting Group, LLC is a Construction Consulting firm with offices in Colorado and Louisiana. As illustrated on our post at Construction Claims Experience, one of Holloway Consulting’s primary practice areas as Construction Consultants is on matters involving causation and damages.
This post continues our series on the services we provide to our clients as Construction Consultants on matters associated with Construction Labor Productivity.
LABOR PRODUCTIVITY | BARRIERS TO MONITORING AND MEASURING
Remarkably, even today, many contractors do not measure or monitor construction labor productivity. In our practice as construction consultants in matters involving labor productivity, common justifications given by our clients for not monitoring productivity have included:
1. I’ve never really monitored productivity,
2. I don’t know how to properly measure productivity,
3. A productivity control system would be too expensive for me to maintain,
4. My competitors don’t measure productivity, so,
5. Productivity can’t be controlled, and
6. Productivity measurement will not tell me anything about my project that I don’t already know.
The first two reasons cited above are a reflection of past practices where productivity measurement was not a necessity. However, increasing competition for projects, moderate inflation rates, increased project complexity, and greater exposure to legal and financial risks are beginning to change this situation. Productivity measurement has become an inexpensive way to control one of the more important contractor risks; craft labor or direct labor man-hours and costs.
ORIGINS OF LABOR PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS
Historically, the most widely known productivity measurement systems have emerged from the heavy industry construction sectors. Here, firms such as Fluor, KBR, Bechtel, Parsons, and others have treated productivity control as a subset of cost accounting and cost engineering systems. Understandably, many smaller contractors have been discouraged by the apparent complexity and the expense of operating a large, complex cost control system.
The prevailing attitude seems to have been that productivity measurement must be a part of a complex system. In reality, however, the two functions of productivity control and cost control can be separated, and, in doing so, productivity measurement and control can be made simple, inexpensive, effective, and timely.
The last two challenges to productivity measurement can be considered together. Studies have consistently shown that certain problems result from the way projects are designed, organized, planned, and managed, and that these conditions exist whether the project is large or small, commercial or industrial, union or merit shop. A growing body of knowledge says that productivity can be controlled at relatively little cost to the contractor.
Read the next post on Construction Labor Productivity
The Holloway Consulting Group, LLC
12081 W. Alameda Pkwy., #450
Lakewood, CO 80228-2701
Denver Phone: (303) 984-1941
International Toll Free: (888) 545-0666
Fax: (303) 716-0432
Email: steve.holloway@disputesinconstruction.com
Blog: disputesinconstruction.com
Web: hcgexperts.com
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