You need a plan and a tool fit for the task if you want to stop margin fade
Without a way to visualize a project schedule, you’ll never staff a job efficiently. It’s that simple.
You’ll throw bodies at it and they’ll stay there until the job is over because you know the project schedule will change at some point, so why bother planning labor out any further than you have to? Ramp ups and ramp downs will be based on gut feelings instead of project data. Every single job will be either overstaffed or understaffed. When you schedule “to the wall” like this – assigning workers to a job until the end or indefinitely – you’re creating a chain reaction just waiting to blow up in your face.
Do these scenarios sound familiar?
• No visibility into labor ramp up/down needs
• No way to offload workers when tasks finish
• Foremen hoarding workers: not out of malice; they’re just protecting their jobs
• Talented workers sitting idle or used for low value tasks while other jobs go understaffed
• Margin evaporating in the final stretch thanks to reactive labor moves and overtime
Scheduling to the wall costs contractors time, money and sanity
Margin fade will keep biting you. You’ll keep losing money on the last 20 percent of every project because these last-minute labor transfers will eat up any profits you projected at the start. Watching your margins disappear at the end of a job is demoralizing. It’s not a bad estimate that’s to blame, it’s the lack of a Labor Plan and a tool that enables you to sidestep self-created labor shortages, missed deadlines and lost profits.
A simple five minute planning session up front could save you thousands of dollars and hours of firefighting later. You’ll confidently know not just who’s on what job, but that they’re the most proficient person for the task they’re assigned to. If you’d known in October that your field leader and crew were only budgeted for July, you could’ve pushed back when the general contractor asked to accelerate the schedule. You’d have had data to prove what that extra labor would actually cost.
The hidden costs of scheduling to the wall
This kind of blind scheduling costs contractors in more ways than one. One of the biggest ways? Foremen hoarding workers. When people are scheduled “to the wall” there’s no clear off-ramp.
Without a defined target or end date, there’s no trigger to move them. Field leaders instinctually hang on to their crews, even when they’re no longer needed. That makes it nearly impossible to reallocate labor in time for the next job, which delays mobilization and causes issues on upcoming projects – one example of the chain reaction mentioned earlier.
You’ll never see the labor peak coming, either. Which means as a project ramps up seemingly out of nowhere, you’ll scramble to find workers, reactively pulling them off one job to address fires on another over and over again. This type of reactionary Labor Planning isn’t doing you any favors and adversely affects every project on your calendar.
Phone calls and texts might help you move labor, but you can’t visualize how these old-school ways hurt your bottom line until it’s way too late. If you can’t see your schedule, you can’t staff your jobs efficiently. Period. No ramp up, no ramp down, just a pile of workers thrown at the problem until the project ends. When superintendents proactively Labor Plan at the front end and create schedule durations, though, they can stop this bleeding.
Spreadsheets and whiteboards won’t cut it
You need a tool fit to the task.
One where you can add your estimated labor hours, start date, end date and use industry standard labor curves to create effective, accurate and easily customizable Labor Forecasts. One built from the ground up for self-perform contractors. You need RIVET Work.
RIVET is custom built to help self-perform contractors efficiently plan and allocate labor in a truly proactive way. Built-in Forecasting tools let you add estimated hours, start and end dates to chart a customizable Labor Plan that accounts for ramp ups and ramp downs. You’ll see how each additional transfer will cost you, too.
See what a Workforce Management platform built for self-perform contractors can do for your business.