What Is Real-Time Productivity Tracking?
Real-time productivity tracking captures labor hours and installed quantities in the field as the work happens, instead of collecting them on paper and entering them days later. The payoff is a percent complete and an earned-hours figure that describe today rather than last week, which is the difference between correcting a slipping activity and documenting one.
How Time and Quantities Get Captured in the Field
Today, time and quantity collection applications are light years ahead of earlier iterations in terms of functionality, and are easily accessible via web, cell phone or tablet allowing workers more time in the field not the office.
Working with these types of advanced tools can also allow for real-time productivity tracking on active jobsites. Why does that matter? Knowing where you really are in your operations at any time can give you great insight early on to help you make decisions that have the greatest impact.
Dominic Cozzetto, a product manager at InEight, has a great analogy about how far these tools have come. “New technology in capturing time and quantities in construction is equal to driving a horse drawn buggy to jumping in a Tesla and cruising down the highway,” he explains.
“We’ve gone from paper-based timecards and claiming quantities on a printout of your budget to carrying around a mobile device that has claiming schemes for quantities and a ton of options on charging time,” he continues. “Still, the most underappreciated thing about all of it is that the front-line workers have adapted to it seamlessly. The foreman have been able to throw down the reigns and hit the auto-drive button because they’re seeing how much easier it makes the ‘paperwork’ side of their job.”
Where to Begin with Real-Time Productivity Tracking
A few relatively straightforward steps can get the ball rolling and thereby facilitate the expeditious collection of time and quantity data. As a first step, employee data is typically integrated into the system via an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or payroll system or entered manually. This data generally consists of employee numbers, names, classifications, wage rates etc. The same goes for construction equipment – excavators, loaders, dozers, pickup truck, compressors etc., all of which can be integrated in a similar fashion.
This first step sets you up for success, especially when using an integrated tool that will drive one source of the truth for that data to the other areas where it can be used.
How Much Cost Code Detail Do You Actually Need?
There is virtually no limit to the level of detail that a contractor can incorporate into the process. Today’s tools make it possible to break cost codes down into discrete and specific work activities, thereby providing a means for allocating all types of time and cost. Breaking the project down into easily consumable pieces allows for a more accurate view of actual percent complete. Also, charging time against a specific code allows a contractor to more accurately estimate earned hours and dollars.
Cost codes should have enough detail to adequately address all of a site’s job functions. The greater the detail, the greater their usefulness. For example, rather than creating broad cost codes for form work reinforcing steel and concrete, a contractor can arrange them into different foundation types, areas, applications or other functions. Showing completion by foundation can easily be audited and validated by a quick walk around the site. This will also allow for greater accuracy when estimating and creating a great basis for past costs feeding future estimates.
What to Look for in a Productivity Tracking System
For the most part, these applications have some common components: a control function for budgeting, forecasting, change orders, etc.; a plan function for establishing the schedule of work; a progress function for performing the daily planning, charging time, entering quantities, approving and sending to payroll.
Users can easily regulate access to the application by establishing separate accounts for a host of participants, including asset owners, subcontractors, or contractors and engineers. In the process, they can regulate whether participants have “view-only” or “edit” privileges, keeping the quality of the data secure and consistent.
Beyond those components, field capture tends to fail in a handful of predictable ways. These are the things worth testing before committing to a system:
- Time and quantities captured in the same transaction. When hours live in one system and installed quantities in another, productivity becomes a reconciliation exercise that happens weekly at best.
- A cost code structure that mirrors how the estimate was built, so actuals land against budget without a mapping step. Cost item assemblies are usually where that alignment is won or lost.
- Genuine offline capture. Remote sites lose connectivity, and a crew that has to re-key a shift once signal returns will go back to paper.
- Role-based access down the chain for owners, subcontractors, and engineers, with view and edit handled separately so shared visibility does not mean shared editing rights.
- A clean path from field entry to payroll approval. Every rekeying step between the two is somewhere hours get lost or restated.
In these days of challenging productivity rates across many market sectors, the ability to produce real-time productivity estimates has immeasurable value. Used in tandem with existing platforms, today’s tools enable a contractor to calculate productivity on the spot and, subsequently, make real-time productivity tracking adjustments that keep the project on course.
InEight Plan & Progress covers the field side of this — daily planning, time charging, and quantity claiming through to payroll approval — while InEight Report & Explore turns what the field records into the productivity view supervisors and estimators work from.
