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E 25: Who Should Plan & Track Quantities
45 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Carlos & Jason discuss how & why project teams track materials to measure production rates.
They chat about who should be responsible for planning & tracking quantities, the importance of context for best practice, and the differences between levels of planning.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Break Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 25 of the Offsite Podcast where we chat all things construction and technology. My name's Carlos Caballo. And I'm Jason Lancini. G'day Carlos, how are you going? Yeah, pretty good. Thanks, yourself? I'm good, I'm good. I think we need to start kicking off this conversation about when the mandated shutdown of this conversation slash podcast happens over Christmas.
00:00:24
Speaker
Start negotiating. Yeah. I'm not up for a Christmas day episode. That's for sure. Where's the commitment? I think we should, I think we should do, take December and January off. Not from work, but from just like, we have to go to work for sure.
00:00:41
Speaker
Yeah, December chat. Yeah, so the live chat does disappears and no one speaks to us. The app just goes offline. All servers dead. Yeah, there's no one here. Right, so.
Importance of Tracking in Construction
00:01:00
Speaker
Today, we're going to chat about a bit of a hot topic. And anyone mistakenly joining this podcast that is not from a construction background is going to be very disappointed with what a hot topic is. Every day at the moment, I'm talking to teams about tracking materials. And ultimately, what they're trying to do is produce production rates.
00:01:22
Speaker
It's being driven by the government who are pushing the modern methods of construction agenda, so contractors are really trying to think through how these things should be done properly with the right technology.
00:01:33
Speaker
But if we go back to sort of a theory, production rates, and we think about production rates, it's like how many cubes of excavation should we be doing per day, and how many are we actually doing, whether we can work out what resource levels we are, and we can really understand what we're going to achieve over a period of time to determine the outcome.
00:01:53
Speaker
My gut feeling is it's not sort of first nature for engineers, but it is being pushed by project managers. But ultimately, we think about its origin, we have a tender and planners at tender sort of stage will take standard production rates that either a company has or from like textbook type stuff.
00:02:11
Speaker
that apply that to their schedules and then that logic builds in. But when we actually go to daily weekly planning, a lot of that information is lost and there's never been like this real consistent way of tracking what we're doing. It gave us those original production rates. So I think to kick off the conversation,
00:02:30
Speaker
Who, I guess, in your view, Jason, who should actually own this?
Value of Production Rate Tracking
00:02:34
Speaker
Who should own the planning and tracking of quantities of material on site? If I could, if I could answer your question by not answering it, asking you one, another question, like as with your background as like a QS, so I guess agnostic from like a planner or an engineer, would you, why do you think it is valuable to track production rates?
00:02:57
Speaker
on a project. So you're on a project today. Do you want people to track production rates and why do you think it's valuable? I think the one thing that jumps out the most.
00:03:07
Speaker
which I can see the sort of the most value from is, I guess, decision making. If you're smashing across doing x cubes of excavation per day, there's always this decision on, right, how much resource should we be putting on this? And by knowing your production rates, and you want that production rate to be, I guess, as you want as small a variable as possible, like you don't want to do 500 one day, 1500 the next day, you want to be doing like 99 or 101 because it reduces like the risk profile of where you're going to end up.
00:03:35
Speaker
By knowing that, you can make a decision later. So if you're going to finish an activity two weeks early, but the following activity can't start, why over resource to finish two weeks early? You can have less resource and then use the full amount of time.
00:03:52
Speaker
And vice versa, if you know you're going to be late because your production rates are low and you actually understand that data, you can make a decision to over-resource an activity, which is extra cash, but you can save your program at the other end because you're not going to kick out something that's critical. So I think by actually understanding your production rates, you can make better decisions, but it has to be accurate. Otherwise it's like finger in the air type stuff.
00:04:17
Speaker
Let's put aside, there's a certain type of project which is a 100% production rate driven type of project. You're building a 400 kilometer pipeline, you're building a 70 span launched bridge with the same thing happening over and over again. You're doing hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of earthworks or something where the vast, vast, vast majority of the project is one action or one
00:04:45
Speaker
like certain production and the goal is to get to the end of 50 spans and the goal is to get to the end of a couple hundred kilometers of pipeline. Yeah, production rate tracking makes total sense. No one can argue with that, I don't think. And so let's like put that project type to the side because those are, I don't think anyone on those projects are not tracking production rates. They are production rate type jobs. But then you get like,
00:05:10
Speaker
the multidisciplinary-friendly project, it gets a little bit more woolly. And you were talking before about the history of it or the origin of it. And I have a theory that part of the origin of it is if you start with a master schedule for your project and someone has spent the time to resource load it with labor or materials or whatever it is, it's a mathematically pretty or clean way.
00:05:40
Speaker
To measure whether you're making or losing money by tracking the production against a loaded resource in that schedule. Part of my theory is like you, some people do it because in lieu of better measures of performance, it's the, it's a way you can do it based on the data from what the plan is. But it's not.
00:06:00
Speaker
It has flaws, right? So let's think about the, the project that's a multidisciplinary project. There's like some structures, there's some electrical, uh, maybe there's like some fit out component. If you are, if you've, if someone's coming like resource loaded that schedule.
Challenges in Tracking Production Rates
00:06:16
Speaker
with whatever, labor or some sort of material. First of all, it's almost never going to be accurate, the resource loading. So you pick any individual activity in there, four weeks, build a deck to concrete or something. It's like a couple hundred cube of concrete loaded on a task since after three weeks. And in reality, you call all of that concrete on one day at the end of the task.
00:06:38
Speaker
There's like a messiness to it that doesn't allow you to track production rate of that type of task. Then there's like another thing that can happen, which is whatever resource you load into the schedule is kind of like treated like an incentive because you start measuring against it, like an earned value against, you know, we've loaded, I don't know, labor hours or whatever in there.
00:06:59
Speaker
Uh, let's say you've got a project, you're tracking cubic creatives of concrete as your measure of production. And you've got a component of electrical. Well, the incentive, the incremental incentive for everyone on the project every month is to do concrete over electrical because that's the measure. So I think that like, yeah, uh, I guess to summarize my, my thinking on it is that putting aside the projects where production rate tracking is like obvious and.
00:07:28
Speaker
the primary tool that you would use. Multidisciplinary friendly projects need to be careful about how they use production rate tracking. Yeah, so I guess three aspects there. One, yes, it's like it's clear and obvious if you're doing like repetitive precast segments, things like that, it's just obviously you're doing production rates because everything is centered around that.
00:07:52
Speaker
multidisciplinary yet, like, if you're looking at something that's like highly was spoken, and everything is unique, and it's not tested in any way, it's gonna be really difficult, and you would sort of question the value, even though you still need to do add value, and you still need to pay subbies, and both of those things you need to know the cons anyway, so why wouldn't you at least track it to try and use that information in the in the right way.
00:08:13
Speaker
But if we think about, so let's take highways, there's no offsite manufacture, maybe barriers, but let's ignore that. Like the majority of the works are earthworks, drainage, surfacing, that sort of stuff. Like they're the big components. So it is all onsite and there's a massive drive to track production rates in that. And they want the like production line thinking without having a production line. So they're not doing anything offsite, but they need to have that
00:08:37
Speaker
So the thing that they're getting really excited is a bit much of a word for this. I'm not sure anyone gets excited about production rates, but the thing that's really important to them is to be able to take those production rates that you're doing right now, and then apply that to the master schedule because
00:08:54
Speaker
I might have a few planners bark at me for assuming that they don't do this, but I don't know if planners constantly update production rates in their master schedule to keep with you at the end date. And what highways are trying to do at the moment is, right, based on the last month, we're achieving X per day for each of these five core materials. So let's plug those into the master schedule and see where we are. I then make decisions based on right out of these five production rates
00:09:22
Speaker
Technically, this third one is the one that's going to drive the program if we continue at the same rate. So let's think about improving that or over-resourcing it. So without tracking this, you can't do that exercise really, because you need to know planned actual points plus resource. Yeah, but you almost certainly will be tracking it. And like you said, you'll be tracking all that information already for a bunch of other reasons, like paying people and paying
00:09:48
Speaker
paying like a quarry or paying a subcontractor. And so it goes back to like probably your first question, which is who's responsible for
Roles in Tracking and Automation Potential
00:09:57
Speaker
it. If I've got a schedule, which is got production rates baked into it from a tender, that makes some sort of generic assumptions over the length of the task, this production rate for doing drainage.
00:10:09
Speaker
And we're tracking the length of how much drainage we've installed because we need to pay us something that's doing it or whatever the reason is. I would expect that team is tracking the production rates of that and running scenarios. But like, if I put my engineer hat on, I don't actually need to be, you don't need me to do any work for that.
00:10:25
Speaker
The planning team would have the plan data. Our project should have a mechanism for capturing the actuals, whether it's dockets coming in from queries, invoices from subbies, whatever the source of the actual is. I would expect that people are running scenarios, but don't give me, and I'm already doing 15 jobs to run the project. Don't give me another one.
00:10:49
Speaker
But if you think about, let's take the example of payment. So the QS is paying the drainage, so based on form of contract, the QS is either paying labor or they're going to pay like activity schedule, meters of duct blade or whatever that is.
00:11:05
Speaker
So you still don't have both. So whose responsibility is it to capture the other? If only one of them is needed. Yeah, but you're the QS. Why wouldn't you let the contract on the basis of what the thing, what drives value for us? You know, like if, if the thing that we need to get done is 600 meters of drainage, let the contracts and pay on schedule rates of meters of drainage. Don't, don't measure on like widgets installed of some other thing.
00:11:31
Speaker
It's kind of dreamland that you're going to get QS's to let contracts based on the metrics that the cloud project controllers and project managers want to catch. Yeah, but they're the same people that are coming to the engineers like three months later being like, how many meters of thing were installed? Like you let them, that's a contract. Yeah.
00:11:54
Speaker
So if we think about where this was, if we think about a typical project now, so we've got contractors now thinking, right, we really need to capture this in a regimented way using the right tools and that sort of stuff. This information was captured traditionally where? Side diary?
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, it varies. So some projects will capture it. A side dive in side dive is inherently bad at consistently capturing it. Cause it's got so much other, other info in there. You don't know if you've missed some, got some, whatever. So it's, it's inherently a like bad way to capture the actuals. There's usually some sort of, someone makes guess what they do, mate. They won't go and open a spreadsheet and they put a column for the.
00:12:35
Speaker
It's here all that they're tracking or whatever it is. And then per day, how much is going in? And someone gets the job of going to fill in that spreadsheet. Yeah. And they're probably thatching them to reset time.
00:12:50
Speaker
One of the things that happened, and we've had previous guests join us and talk about this all the time, the job of an engineer has expanded and expanded to cover all of the inefficient gaps around how we run our project.
00:13:08
Speaker
There's a bit of information we need while the person that must know about it is the engineer. So let's go ask the engineer to fill out another spreadsheet. So, okay, we want to start tracking production rates of widgets installed. Oh, engineer, you fill out this spreadsheet every day. We want to give a four-week forecast of how many widgets we're going to need. Oh, engineer, can you do another spreadsheet for that? We want to work out how many widgets a day and night shift. Do another spreadsheet for that.
00:13:32
Speaker
And so like, yeah, definitely like you can't disagree that production rate tracking is something that projects should do on certain types of projects. I still, they still say that they've some that it's, you got to be really careful about. But I would say going back to your first question, who should do it? Our engineers need the output. I don't know if they're the, I don't, I don't know if you're getting a real good return on investment if you pay an engineer to source the input.
00:13:55
Speaker
Okay, so parking the responsibility couch here, let's jump forward. Sorry, I'm hung up on it. Going forward a few years, let's see, we've got the right technology which automatically captures the actuals, right? So it's just, it's being done, it's no one's responsibility. When it comes to planning, that sort of information would be perfect in like a co-pilot situation of someone planning to do an activity that has quants and somebody goes, hey, that's never happened.
00:14:22
Speaker
because you haven't done that once, like this year on your projects based on that resource level. Can you see us getting to that point?
Real-time Feedback and Key Material Focus
00:14:29
Speaker
I can see us making co-pilot suggestions, but to get them to a spot without actually accurate.
00:14:36
Speaker
The problem ends up quite often at a master schedule where all of the detail is a little bit obfuscated and you make a task and say it's drainage, you know, changing zero to a thousand. And the production rate that you assume is an all in production rate that captures set up mobilization, demob testing.
00:14:56
Speaker
the thing that you would tend to the job on for sure and then you in that case it almost doesn't make sense to track production rate because the production rate that you're actually measuring is actual production so not the all in rate so there's it's like it's what it's are you measuring apples against apples or apples against oranges.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, because the conversation that, you know, the reason for us talking about this is you've had this conversation at the like the six week look ahead level a lot. I just think that the production rate that goes into task at a level five schedule is a different production rate to the production rate that's in the master schedule and probably a different production rate to the one that's in the tender. And so the, the level five schedule production rate.
00:15:41
Speaker
is more closely mapped to the actual, but then it goes to like, what's the incremental value for building that level five plan fully resource load? Because I think like the production rate tracking, because it's a fully loaded production rate for a tender or for a master schedule.
00:15:58
Speaker
You really just need to know total widgets start and end and you average it because that's how you tender it. You don't really need to, I don't know if you know how much value is to say like you did four days of set up. We did five days of work at this rate. And then another four days because the next 10, you're probably going to roll it into the, the fully, you know, the spread. Right. So that's why I'm a bit like I'm.
00:16:19
Speaker
not like the most pumped up about tracking production rates every day for every activity, blah, blah, blah, and putting it into a level five schedule. Because definitely like the job of putting that into a level five schedule is a lot of work. And I would only do it for those jobs where we're doing the same thing repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. Don't know if you agree. Yeah, the, it's going to change as you go through the levels for sure. But ultimately what we want is like detailed actual information driving.
00:16:49
Speaker
top level banner. And that's what that's the real gap, isn't it? Because like tender teams, I've been on a project before where like bad office sent like, it's friendships and you fill in production rates and you just, you just fill it in. And you're like, Oh, there's, there's old companies that run on that system. Um, yeah. Yeah. But it's so accurate.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've spoken to projects as well where they employ someone to do that and they just make the numbers a fudge because of the problem of like the schedule has got like this sort of blended production rate that captures the.
00:17:30
Speaker
set up demo, blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, I'm probably going to get, you know, I'm probably going to get messages from planet as being like, no, no, no, this is very important or whatever. But I just, I just, you know, I just think fundamentally it's not measuring apples against apples. And in order to get an apples for apples measurement, you really need to build in a lot of work at like the level five. And I, for an engineer to do that, it's just, I don't know if their return on investment is there for that time. Yeah.
00:17:59
Speaker
I think there's a real decision to make as well. It seems by these contractors are just focusing on the two or three core components that they make with the scheme. Whereas before, I think the thought went, we need to track all materials. And there's no value from that. There's going to be two or three key things that drives the entire project, like rebar with concrete or surfacing and excavation of highways. And that makes a lot more sense. Rather than trying to do everything, but then having so much data, you can't really actually do anything about it.
00:18:29
Speaker
I think it's just sort of dead information. Yeah. Any process that requires, there's got to be a better way than currently exists to capture the actual rates that we did stuff because yeah, any spreadsheet that someone makes on a project, you know, within two weeks, we forgot to update it for last week. And then before some deadline in three weeks time, I have to open it up, find it again, make up all the numbers in the middle.
00:18:53
Speaker
There's got to be a, you know, like you said, fast forwarding a period. It's got to be from either quality records, you know, depend how fast, how far we fast forward, you know, maybe those cameras watching that measure it and all that sort of stuff. Um, but yeah.
Quality Records vs Site Diaries
00:19:12
Speaker
Like that's where we really should be paying to like us should do pay off the quality records, not have a look at site. Go. Yeah. You've done.
00:19:20
Speaker
X lots of projects in Australia. That's 100% what happens. You don't, you know, quality lot, not close submitted. You don't get paid. And so that process of that feedback of payment to the quality record drives really good. Well, one really good quality records and clot and timely, like close out of it. But yeah, you can start using that. Like, because there's a feedback loop of do this, get that that's important to the project. It always happens. And then you can start relying on it for.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, lots of things on a project. So yeah, quality records become really, really important. Talking to us, speaking to a friend recently who does like forensic analysis for the contractors in claims and stuff, primary source of records for them in establishing claims is usually quality records, especially in Australia. Like the site diary is there, but it's, it's
00:20:10
Speaker
You know, it's intermittently completed and it's completed to varying standards. Whereas there's a, because there's such a feedback loop on the quality record side to payment, you want to know when the concrete was poured. Well, the quality record, you know, the poor inspection or whatever it is, and get approved when it happened. Yeah. Makes sense. Right. You managed to slag off QS's and pick up the genius in one shot. Job done. That's a week of time for today. Thank you very much for listening.
00:20:40
Speaker
Thanks.