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    28 July 2015

    How to figure out project and job costing profitability?

    When a small or mid-sized company is involved in projects located hundred of miles away from its head office, how do you manage staff related to project costing? This type of playing field can get tricky when it comes down to have the right tools to reign in your job cost evaluation biding.

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    Usually, we’re talking about very tight profit margins numbers based on a locked budget agreed with the client. As the job progresses, do you find yourself on a strong footing or feeling the rug being pulled away from under you? We’ve all been there. As we know too well, every WIP is frayed with uncertainties, demanding management to steer the boat as much by calm sea as by stormy weather.

    Take for example this company specializing in the aluminum and glazing curtain wall fabrication and installation for the commercial and institutional fields. Some of their clients are located hundreds of miles away. Its fleet of trucks needs first to deliver the aluminum structures on time and then its workers have to erect them in a building already being build by other workers.

    Every construction site goes through its own turbulence. It’s the nature of the beast. A delay by one of these crews may force your own team to postpone their start in the morning or halt their work later in the day, costing you money. You need to act swiftly to address the problem and to make the accurate tactical move to steer the ship back into the right direction.

    The next hours or few days will be vital. To achieve this, you need data to grasp the challenge and assess your options.  What kind of data? That’s where a solution like the MX Project Manager comes into play and literally save the day. Your day.

    MX Project Manager is an integrated time-management system on the web designed to manage real-time production, and to cap that off, it is fully integrated to the Employee’s MX Self Service and the MX Smart TimeSheets, giving management tons of vital real time management stats.

    Mind you, if we were talking about a steel bolts manufacturer with machines churning out thousands of these precious metallic pins, day in day out, all year round, we wouldn’t need to resort to such an advanced computing solution.

    Basically because we can assume that the first bolt manufactured on January 1st would be made as thoroughly as the last one created on the final day of the year.

    The MX Project Manager is at his best when dealing with more complex and unanticipated situations often found in hazardous professional terrains, thus our firm specializing in the aluminum and glazing curtains as a solid example.

    With a tool like the Project Manager, you get stats on your workers’ productivity and crystal clear graphs detailing each hour done on the job by each of them.

    This will help you switch between individuals working on the job to get the best results at the best costs. And hundreds of miles away, your supervisor on location shares the exact same data in real time with management at the head office, helping everyone to respect deadlines and extra fees. 

    But what’s even more beautiful in that solution, it’s that after your contract is completed, Project Manager allows you to examine the job statistics to bid more accurately on future projects evaluation.

    Thanks to the possibility of cross-referencing data using intuitive graphs between several past jobs of the same nature, you get to see a clear picture of the highs and lows points that had to be dealt with on the assignment, giving you knowledge and understanding to better plan your subsequent move and save money on that next request for proposal.

    MX Project Manager is the most user-friendly tool for your whole staff and the easiest to learn on the market today.

    To get a better idea on a ROI using the MX Project Manager please contact an MPEX representative to generate a cost savings.

    Share your thoughts about it. Don’t hesitate to post a comment below.

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