Meanwhile back on site……When Necessity Smashes Productivity

It may well be the mother of invention, but I’ve seen it smash productivity and far too often.

I want to share with you a tragedy I’d witnessed on a building site one day (I’d seen it happen often, but this was a great example, just to prove my point).

It was the better part of 4 years ago. This was during my time and motion study (I call it my field research) of the home building and renovating sectors.

This day we were on a client’s site, it was a renovation and an extension. The home wasn’t flash, it needed work. I guess the client had bought well, and now the plan was to step it up.

It was on a great block, in a really leafy suburb of leafy northern Sydney. No matter what they spent, I knew they’d make it back several times over.

Anyway, on this particular day the builder, two of his team, myself and a three other subbies, each had two per trade for a gyprocker, an electrician and a plumber. Nothing unusual there.

There was a lot of human traffic on site, as you’d imagine. It was otherwise a normal day, mid-stream on a project where several trades intersected, so the traffic-cop (me) was on duty start to finish, otherwise egos could get bruised, or far worse. And, as everything wears thin when people are under the pump, patience is most often the first victim. I wanted to avoid that happening.

It wasn’t just fielding endless questions (no one had taken the time to read what they’d been supplied them ahead of arriving on site, as I’d asked them to), it was a case of making sure people didn’t get in each other’s way. As I said, the traffic-cop; normal day, normal site.

But what was bewildering, what was truly tragic, was that on this particular day there were a total of 7 separate trips to a variety of hardware and building material suppliers to purchase and get materials needed, just for the one day.

Admittedly the gyprockers didn’t need any excursions due to the fact I’d supplied their materials and requisites, so it would have been my bad if they’d had to disappear.

But of the 7 trips made that day (I will concede one was of my own making, I hadn’t factored enough wastage so ran short of timber — this was before we built our builder’s app which would have prevented all of this too!), I’d argue that every one of these trips were entirely avoidable.

The issue though isn’t one of attributing blame, so much, as it is a study in resourcing and how easily, simply and quickly, productivity on any project can be smashed to pieces when it simply isn’t sufficiently well planned.

However, in the interest of balance and fairness, it needs to be said that in Building no two jobs are the same and no two tasks are the same, even though their specification may be identical, because the circumstances can easily and often vary (i.e access is compromised, weather, site conditions, specific challenges around a given task, etc, etc).

Understanding the sensitivities of any given project and planning to address for and account for all those sensitivities is what project management, fundamentally, is meant to do.

If it doesn’t then the productivity of a given project is shot to pieces from the get-go.

But let me back up a piece and explain “productivity” in this context.

If productivity is essentially a measure of the efficiency with which anything is produced (i.e time, cost, labour, work quality, delivery standards and project completion measured against all the original planning), then any loss of productivity must, you would assume, have to be expensed somewhere.

In other words, any loss of productivity is a cost to a project.

So, let me ask you a question, who pays for that?

In this context, you can safely assume that it can’t possibly be the client. Of course not.

Ultimately it comes out of the builder’s hip pocket. Which is just plain stupid, particularly when it can so easily be overcome.

And this is where the challenge becomes ever more profound. Something as seemingly innocuous as unscheduled trips to hardware stores or supplier outlets, etc, all have a cost.

And ALL of them, ultimately, come out of the builder’s hip pocket (just to restate my point).

It’s not as though you can pass on stuff you just plain forgot about or neglected to factor in.

And all of this fundamentally applies to any and every sector of industry, not just to building alone, but in every respect to building too.

So, on this occasion, on this particular day, there were 7 separate trips to suppliers, to hardware, to wherever. And none of them were necessary.

Tragic, but wait, it gets worse.

Let’s assume for a second that each trip cost one hour in manpower (or whichever word you care to use). But it didn’t just cost one hour, did it?

No, because that’s just the time it took (to stop work, down tools, get to a vehicle, drive to wherever, go find what you need, pay for it, maybe grab something to eat because lunch was 2 hours ago, and meanwhile field 3 calls from guys back on site asking “mate, can you get me……”, then drive back, distribute whatever, eat whatever, re-start the task) at least, and I mean at least, but very likely a lot more than an hour. Hour and a half, maybe.

But that also doesn’t factor in the lost time on the task being performed. Let alone any consequential impact of that lost time (i.e impact on other trades scheduled to follow on).

The combined time, let’s call it a gross 3 hours, is a direct bottom line hit and it ONLY happened because stuff wasn’t planned well enough.

This isn’t a criticism but don’t dismiss it, IT IS A COST. So, it sure should be a wake up call.

It is simply a function of planning and project management. And today that means it’s a function of using simple mobile technology to overcome it (I’m not selling anything, I just want people to see how easy it is to overcome outdated loss-making practices). Meaning, use simple accessible technology so you never need rely on memory, notes, scraps of paper or someone else’s recollection to keep your project on track (productive and profitable!).

I’ve met builders who have told me “Tony that doesn’t happen on my sites”.

But I know it does. I’ve met just as many who have said “Tony this is how I do it, and it works” and I watch them do otherwise and I can’t help but think, why? You’re willing to forego income, profitability, just to prove a point?

I promise, I’m not interested in winning an argument.

I’m only interested in helping hundreds of thousands of builders be better at what they do, to be more productive, to win more work, to be more profitable.

I can talk until I’m blue in the face but the tools we’ve built are proving, time and time again, that we can help reduce wasted labour, wasted time, wasted energy and resources, etc.

When it is literally a case of saving potentially thousands of dollars per day just in time wasted, let alone time lost on tasks in train, this has to be a no brainer.

The more I considered all of this the more I got to wondering, surely this doesn’t happen everyday? But the more sites I studied, the more people I interviewed and researched, the more I came to realise that it sure as hell does happen every day, and on most sites too.

As I pondered whether this happens on building sites everywhere, on homes, commercial sites, fitouts, landscaping projects, etc, I began to do some maths.

It struck me that the hit to productivity, let alone to profitability, every single day, could be massive. And from something as innocuous as necessities, albeit ones which hadn’t been planned for.

Multiply that cost across tens of thousands of sites across the country and the loss of productivity, and the consequential hit to profitability, could be potentially stratospheric purely due to unplanned necessities.

Which is madness, pure and simple, particularly when you realise that none of it need happen, ever.

Necessity may well be the mother of invention, but it sure as hell shouldn’t ever be permitted to smash productivity, ever.

© Tony Huxley, Trabr Limited 2020