Improving Field Labor Efficiency and Job Site Visibility

The Challenge:

Mader Construction Company partnered with Carpedia to improve the productivity of its workforce in the field and to strengthen project management practices.  A common challenge in the construction industry is a lack of visibility to job progress on a short term basis. This issue makes resource planning and performance management difficult and renders many discussions unnecessarily subjective.  In addition, retirement was imminent for multiple key members of the leadership team and the pre-existing division of roles, responsibilities and knowledge base was not properly aligned for an orderly transition.

The Results:

• Gross margin increased by 36% in the first year.
• New processes increased field labor productivity by 12.2%.
• Worked in coordination with the Union and within the CBA to ensure rapid change could be accomplished.
• Implemented planning tools to increase the percentage of apprentice hours, reducing the average wage rate.
• Created a process for systematically planning and assigning work, and aligning the Project Managers and Foremen.
• Implemented a new systems to accurately track and report on project progression on a weekly basis.

Specific Actions to Achieve Results

• Designed and implemented processes for better organization of job sites to reduce the time requirement for materials gathering/replenishment.
• Created and installed reference charts to simplify and increase accuracy of materials pre-staging.
• Created a tool status/tracking system to minimize faulty equipment in the field.
• Installed a quality assurance system to reduce rework in the field.
• Implemented a standardized planning and work assignment process to align Project Managers and Foremen and ensure back plans exist for unexpected interruptions to workflow.

The Results:

“The project team was extremely professional and a pleasure to work with. With no prior knowledge of our estimating and accounting software your team became experts in short order. As a company that has been around for years and successful it became somewhat apparent that we made money in spite of ourselves quite often. Change is often a nasty word in the construction business and we need to embrace that if we wanted to stay relevant in the future. Through your many hours of observing our activities you were able to put in place some real positive processes and more importantly showed us how to sustain those processes moving forward.”

President, Mader Construction