Improve Your Productivity And Increase Your Profits

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Every business wants to improve its productivity. The correlation between productivity and profit are easily measurable and is an area that should be a focus of any business organization.

But how does a business become more productive?

There have been numerous studies on maximizing productivity—changing the workflow structure, changing the roles expected of members in the organization, expanding the labor pool, offering incentives such as a bonus or other stimulus, and even changing the regular hours of operation to accommodate more continuous activity.

Productivity is best understood as the ratio between output and the input required to accomplish that outcome.

For example, if you’re building widgets, the ratio would be the total number of widgets completed versus the labor and components needed to accomplish the total number of widgets in a given amount of time.

Analyze The Right Type Of Data To See Productivity Improvements

Every organization has different needs to be met, and each should have its way of analyzing what is most effective in maximizing output and productivity.

In construction, measuring building projects with the amount of labor required can illustrate unnecessary waste in the production process. Measuring the specific job task with the total number of hours needed to achieve completion is an excellent way to look for discrepancies in output performance.

Whatever decision is made to improve productivity, the key challenge is to analyze whether it’s working and how effective the change has been.

It’s the same challenge in any profession.

For example, how can you know if a doctor is acting on peak performance, or how does a lawyer organize litigation to be most effective? They each have different metrics that can be documented and analyzed to show areas of high-performance and improvement.

Your business needs to document and track what should be done, what is expected to be completed, and whether it was accomplished, and at what date the task was finalized.

That’s the time when a submittal log becomes essential.

The Benefits Of Working With A Submittal Log

A submittal log benefits the foreman to analyze what tasks are being accomplished faster by fewer people and those tasks that require more time, labor, and energy to complete.

Basically, a submittal log is a document that details what is the task to be done, how it will be accomplished, the amount of time required to achieve it, and all the materials that will be required. They are a document between the ownership group, contractors and subcontractors, and project managers to track and sign-off what tasks should be performed when they should are completed when they were achieved, and how long each one took to accomplish.

Submittal logs track:

•Approval of every aspect of the job task and when agreed upon
•Time for when the task is approved, when it is returned, and how long it took between the decision to action between
•Limit risk-exposure and cost overruns: By everyone from the project owner to the contractor and subcontractor signing off on every step, it will eliminate any potential for liability stemming from unnecessary or ill-performed work and help reduce cost overruns.
•Documents what is approved versus what isn’t: with a submittal log, it’s a checklist of what, when, and how things should be done. If there are discrepancies or the tasks are not signed-off for approval, those tasks should not be performed.
•Budgeting and scheduling: By operating on an approved submittal log, each task is built into the budget and timeline for those activities to occur, eliminating unnecessary waste in labor and time.

For example, these workflow documents help keep large-scale construction activities on track and place a timeline on each one before another task is begun.

By analyzing the number of materials needed at every stage, the total number of labor hours necessary to get it achieved, and the whole time for completion, the construction firm can best determine performance output, allowing the company to be more productive at their next similar construction.

The key to maximizing your business performance is to analyze relevant data, what is functioning well, what needs to improve, and what things may need to be eliminated.

Organizing a workflow plan, utilizing a submittal log for every request and action necessary for the job, and analyzing the data as it comes available will allow the more flexible business to improve job performance and overall productivity.