There is Power in Knowing the Future!

The Benefits of Cost-Based Construction Project Schedules

For centuries, mankind has been fascinated with trying to find ways to predict the future. Whether those ways truly worked or not doesn’t matter. This age-old fascination with fortune-telling proves that man has always known that predicting the future would somehow give them power.

What if I were to tell you that in the world of construction, you do have the ability to know a great deal more about the future of your projects and with that ability obtain the same sort of power mankind has been seeking centuries? Think of the reassurance you could give your project owner clients if you could present the future of their construction projects in a clear and verifiable fashion.  In addition to assurance for your client, being able to demonstrate the future steps of a project combined with the costs of each of those steps will give you the power to improve your ongoing relationship with them by preventing project pitfalls and issues and eliminating waste and costly changes.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to tell your client how your project was going to progress and have it go almost exactly as planned?  Also, how would you feel if you could see the impact of change orders before they occurred? For example, what if you could see clearly which changes would be critical and affect delivery and budget and which ones would not affect either? Wouldn’t that give you the power to make better decisions?  Similarly, what if it were easy for you to set up a monthly payment schedule in advance for contractors and vendors by knowing exactly when activities would occur? That’s power too!

Now imagine if the both the contractor and owner could see the projects upstream cost visibility allowing for milestones to be set and pre-approved. Can you imagine life in a world of better cost planning, work monitoring and swift payments? That’s a world of power, indeed!

As you already know, large percentages of the cost of construction projects are wasted each year due to scheduling or coordination errors, wasted material, and labor inefficiencies. This poor planning results in owners overpaying for their facilities and infrastructure systems. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to demonstrate to your owner clients that these types of losses would not occur on your projects with clearly defined and verifiable cost-based construction project schedules?

Since, typically construction schedules are produced without the benefit of a schedule compliant cost estimate. Schedulers then require others to plug in costs to activities and this very tedious task is often ignored. Since scheduling first and applying cost later is like placing the cart before the horse, most project scheduling leads to errors, poor planning and omitted activities. At Zaxon, our cost-based construction project schedules begin with the cost estimate.  A schedule compliant cost estimate is first broken up into scheduling activities with the respective labor and material costs making it easy for labor hours to become the basis for confirmable activity durations. This more scientific method is much more reliable for creating highly accurate cost-based construction project schedules and keeping projects on time and within budget.  If you would like to learn more about Zaxon’s more scientific approach to cost-based construction project schedules watch our short video https://vimeo.com/112434385