Construction Equipment Executive Institute
It’s been a wild ride since June 1977 when the Apple II was released and VisiCalc launched the spreadsheet revolution. Business information, from accounting to job costing and estimating, is no longer produced by hand. Maintenance work orders are automatically generated right on schedule, and…
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…
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…
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…