The Civil Engineering Contractor July 2019 | Page 31

THOUGHT LEADERS
Man, Machine and Money
– meaningful links in your
construction company
By Andrew Skudder
There are three levers of the construction industry: Man, Machine and Money.
Understanding how these three interrelate and affect one another is like constantly
asking yourself which came first, the chicken or the egg.
www.civilsonline.co.za
not just the interplay between Man,
Machine, and Money, but the insights
of how a subtle difference in one at a
certain time of day, can affect the others.
Imagine the understanding you can
create for your business:
• Do you have the right labour skills
on the job on the right day?
• 
Do you have too many labour
resources in one area and not
enough elsewhere?
• Were they productive? If not, why
not?
• Does it matter what time of day
it is?
Knowing this can help you make
provisions for that cost.
Labour is the largest variable in
construction. So much so, you could
argue it changes every hour. With
40‒60% of construction costs being
labour, you can’t afford not to generate
these insights. It’s like turning a black
and white movie into Technicolor.
Now, you’ve transformed your
site, consider the impact for your
management team. These insights can
enable your management team to
make smarter business decisions, and
create better business outcomes.
The role of the commercial
manager suddenly changes. Instead
of interrogating costs after they have
occurred, he is able to be on site
assessing productivity in real-time
and making instant changes that
generate higher efficiencies on a day-
to-day basis. Equally, the procurement
manager is able to carefully monitor
volumes purchased and ensure that no
unnecessary wastage occurs.
Thanks to technology and software,
automation, activity tracking, data
analytics and reporting can relieve
man of menial tasks. Consequently,
man becomes more useful and
productive, and is able to apply
his human intelligence to strategic
decision-making. Now consider
the impact on money (or earned
value budgeting) when man is more
valuable per hour. nn
CCS
B
ut this isn’t the 1990s. Thanks
to technology, we are finally
able to draw more meaningful
insights between the three. We may
even be able to answer that age-
old question! Integrating data across
every facet of a business isn’t just
about sharing information, it’s
about integrating data to create
new information. New insights.
Specialised software can process and
analyse data at a pace and volume the
human mind will never be able to, so
it makes sense to make effective use
of it for our businesses as well.
Many businesses have been stuck
in the tradition of analysing Man,
analysing Machine and analysing
Money. But what if we could pool all
the information together and draw
connections between the three? Many
construction companies are still not
fully leveraging the power of software
technology within their business.
Take payroll for instance. In
yesteryear, payroll involved a payslip
and related simply to costs.
In our world today, payroll is far
more complex. When analysed against
Machine and Money, it can provide
insights, not just a report of Man.
Payroll exists on three levels; cost,
budget, and accounting. Once the data is
integrated across these three platforms,
we can transform a simple payslip into
intelligence that tells us who was doing
what, where they were doing it and
for how long. And so, we start to see
Bio
Andrew Skudder is the CEO of
Construction Computer Software
(CCS), the main activity of which
is the development, marketing,
sales, implementation and support
of software for the construction
and engineering industry.
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