Construction Equipment Executive Institute
Learn the fundamentals of fleet management from our collection of articles and videos. The best in asset management for the construction equipment professional.
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I got into a lot of trouble as a young field engineer by telling my boss that cost overruns were not a problem. I told him that the real problem lay in the way we built our work and that cost overruns were a symptom of the fact that something was not going well. My job was to find and fix the cause…
How do you reconcile actual costs with what is actually charged to the construction project?
Relationships between construction operations and the equipment-management team are often strained. Operations see the equipment they use as a means to an end—as a way to build the job safely, on budget,…
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The way in which equipment rates and the job charging system impact job margins and company profitability is one of the most controversial subjects that I encounter on a regular basis. Under-recovered equipment costs must be absorbed somewhere in the organization, and job margins can easily…
By the time you reach my age, you are able to take a long-term perspective on things. Long ago and far away, we ran the equipment fleet with little emphasis on preventive maintenance. I spent many school vacations developing preventive maintenance check lists, and we did change the oil, adjust…
Last month we discussed the need to know how equipment-related transactions flow through the organization and detailed a process for operating costs. We introduced a diagram of how charges flow from the job accounts to the…
You have heard what people say: If you want to know how something works, just follow the money. Equipment management is no different, and it is useful to trace the flow of funds through an organization in order to understand and communicate how things work.
This is the first of two…
A construction company is an exciting place to work. Every day is different, and change seems to be the only constant.
All this excitement, change, and turbulence comes about because construction companies continuously bid for, build, and complete unique projects: discrete well-defined…
"What must we do to be a world-class equipment-management organization?” It is a question you should ask yourself, and it is a question you should be prepared to answer.
Your answer can be long and complicated, or it can be so broad as to be of no value. Here are four critical success…
Much time is taken to define and measure what is spent on maintenance. But how much time is spent to define and measure what is returned or, even, what to expect in return?
An equipment executive expects compliments for looking after the company’s assets. They expect longer lives and…
The best thing about my job is that it gives me an opportunity to spend time with the best and the brightest in our business, work on real problems, and, one way or the other, come up with a solution. These articles—this is No. 145 stretching back to October 2003—are the result of being able to…
The proponents of lean manufacturing have taught us two things. First, be clear in your definition of contributory work, the activities that add value and contribute to the final result. Second, focus on waste: define it, measure it, and have clear strategies in place to eliminate it from the…
Questions arise over the benefit of including residual market value in a rate calculation and the analysis done to set the economic life of machines. My answer used to be: “It is not a big deal, leave it out, you do not have good residual value data, and there is nothing wrong with being…
The equipment rate—the estimated cost to own and operate a given machine for a given period of time—is not a simple number. It is a complex, high-risk estimate that plays a major role in many aspects of the business.
There are three things to understand about equipment rate: the risks…
Job costing can be described simply as charging each job or each phase code for the resources they used to produce work, and crediting the job or job-phase code with the budgeted value of the work done.
The labor portion of a given job phase code is accurately and quickly known through…
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