As a steel fabrication cost analyst, you are in an optimal position to influence the competitive advantage your company seeks.
Project efficiency has a direct correlation to your efficiency as a cost analyst. Cost control and increased profit margins are high ideals that can be achieved through your efforts to create competitive and accurate steel project budgets.
The project budget starts and ends with you, so how can you cope with these important responsibilities? It's time to be proactive: pushing the right strategies and processes at the right time is the most important professional tool in an estimator's toolbox.
There are many key areas in the manufacturing workflow where the cost analyst's influence can have a huge impact:
Budgets/Bids
Manufacturing
Construction
Analysis
Let's review the challenges and solutions related to each of these stages to better understand how budget builders can help drive project profitability.
Estimates/Bids
From the volatility of steel prices to the complexity of forecasting labor requirements, the budget maker's job contains ample room for error and inefficiency.
However, this challenge should not be taken without protest. There are strategies that can be implemented to keep material costs down, avoid erroneous charges and improve the accuracy of labor forecasts. Here are some examples:
Keep your project manager up to date: Talk to your project manager. It is best to keep them up to date on supply materials to ensure adequate supplies are on hand and to avoid expensive delays.
Benchmarking: Industry benchmarking helps establish a standard against which material costs can be measured. By conducting in-depth industry research, you can ensure that you are not paying for steel at an excessive cost.
Implement the right software: By developing estimates with the right software solution, you will not only make your own work more efficient and faster, you will also improve the detailing, fabrication and construction stages (more on this below).
Manufacturing
Production managers have the authority to affect the results of any stage of the project. This is a powerful position. However, this advantage can easily be squandered without the right project management technology.
Without proper project management, manufacturers' control can be wasted in favor of less efficient and more fragmented processes. The best way to fully improve project efficiency is to enable fabricators to combine the estimating, detailing, fabrication and construction stages into a single, consistent and streamlined workflow.
There is only one way to achieve this: a technology solution that integrates all of the above and flows information through the workflow. With the right software, manufacturers can best take advantage of upstream collaboration between the estimator and the detailer. Look for software that can take an estimating model and use it from detailing to fabrication in a format that all project stakeholders can read and understand.
Construction
No amount of effort in the past stages means much if a project experiences inefficiencies in the construction stage.
The biggest concern during construction: assembling the parts. That's somewhat reductive, but the most common concern of workers at this stage is how quickly and how efficiently they can assemble the steel without wasting time and effort on mistakes that can risk the safety of the equipment.
Like the previous objectives, this cannot be accomplished in a vacuum. The people assembling the steel at the project site rely on estimators, detailers and fabricators, who should be well versed in the challenges of the project. The optimum result is achieved when the erector can plan his work in advance and, if necessary, can also be given recommendations by the fabricator before the job is delivered to the site.
Solutions are found through interdisciplinary collaboration and the construction stage is greatly expedited when workers can rely on established models that have already been optimized from the budgeting stage.
Analysis
The last step of any successful project is a retrospective evaluation: an analysis of what went right and what went wrong. The construction industry is constantly changing, so staying competitive depends on strategic analysis and constantly implementing improvements. That's why proper attention and effort must be given to analysis.
Analysis can be greatly expedited by consolidating the records from each stage into a central digital location. This means choosing an appropriate modeling and manufacturing software solution.
By housing all project stages in one central solution, analyzing the timeline, quality and usability of the entire workflow becomes an easy task. Thus, when faced with the next project, the learning gained from the analysis stage can be quickly and easily applied moving forward.
All of the above points have one thing in common: the best way to address estimating challenges is through the strategic integration of fabrication software. A platform that covers all stages can help find improvements for the entire project and maximize profitability across the entire steel workflow.
