Impacted Productivity - Unleveled Manpower

The biggest risk for a specialty contractor is the performance of on-site labor.

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One of the biggest impacts to labor productivity is having a sporadic manpower schedule.  The most ideal situation is to have a steady ramp up, stable crew size during peak production followed by a steady demobilization.

Field Productivity: Impacts - Unleveled Manpower Schedule.

No project will be perfect and impacts to highly variable manpower include:

  • Over-manning the project to meet demands resulting in too many people during downtimes lowering productivity.  
  • Learning curve for new team members coming on and off the project.  Studies show that productivity can be impacted by as much as 10% during the first week for a craftsperson learning a new project. 
  • Overtime required to meet the schedule.  Not only will you have the increased cost per hour but you will experience a decrease in productivity and safety.  4 weeks at 5-10’s will impact productivity by 20%.
  • Often poor scheduling goes hand-in-hand with stacking of trades which can cost another 10-50% decrease in productivity for those areas.  
  • There is an increase in the coordination time it takes to move manpower on and off the project which has a direct cost as well as an indirect cost from dilution of management.  

What can you do to improve schedule management on your projects?

Improving Labor Productivity Workshop


Labor Productivity
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Labor Productivity
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