A need for an industry-wide construction productivity measurement baseline was recognized for a number of years leading up to this research effort. Construction productivity data for nationwide use was either not available or considered unreliable. The Business Roundtable’s Construction Industry Cost Effectiveness (CICE) Project Report A-1, Measuring Productivity in Construction, included a recommendation to measure site-level productivity in selected private construction segments, and suggested a logical segment scheme based on construction volume. With consideration of the demographics of the CII membership, a large percentage of which is heavily involved in the petrochemical industry, a typical petrochemical facility was chosen as the initial physical baseline facility or model plant.
The primary goal of the Model Plant Project was to develop a basic petrochemical model plant, simple and generic in nature, such that the construction industry could have a physical baseline against which to measure productivity. Data from a collection of direct labor estimates for a “typical” petrochemical processing facility was chosen as the foundation of the baseline, hence the name “Model Plant.”
Publication 2-1 defines a representative project that establishes a site-level construction productivity measurement baseline for the petrochemical industry, and a standardized method of collecting site productivity data from owners and contractors for analysis and reporting. A secondary objective was to provide a standard code of accounts to enable owners and contractors to compare the performance of their projects to a productivity measurement baseline.
Publication 2-2, the second report of the Cll Model Plant Project, presents comparative information on Baselines 1 and 2 of the project. Users will be able to interpret the information presented in this report according to how they prepare direct labor work hour estimates for their projects. If productivity judgments are applied at the detail level of the code of accounts, then the detailed productivity trends identified by the Model Plant will be useful in assessing the validity of the company’s own experience with respect to productivity. If productivity judgments are assessed at the summary level, then the summary level experience of the Model Plant will be useful.
Publication 2-3 describes a productivity measurement approach that could be applied by contractors of all sizes as a practical management tool. The approach is simple and inexpensive to implement and maintain, timely in providing problem indicators, and independent of other business systems such as estimating and cost accounting. As such, a CII task force was established to identify productivity measurement methods utilized in the construction industry, consider the potential for standardization, establish a basis for trending industry productivity over time, and develop a manual that would demonstrate how productivity measurement is performed.
Source Document 35, The Manual of Construction Productivity Measurement and Performance Evaluation, was specifically written for contractors who did not already measure productivity. The information is easy to interpret and feedback is timely. Thus, the approach is particularly attractive for short-duration projects and activities. The manual provides detailed instructions written for both first-time and experienced users.
Productivity measurement is an elemental building block of the construction management process. Performance evaluation, final cost forecasting, and profitability forecasting are supported by the productivity measurement building block.