Time is the great equalizer of mankind. No matter your wealth or status, it is the one constant we all must work with. Some people make better use of their time while others waste it away in Margaritaville. Whether you prefer to spend your free time reading up on Tony Robbins’ latest time management theories or listening to Jimmy Buffett, time is valuable. (“Cheese Burger in Paradise” and “Livingston Saturday Night” are a couple of my favorites.)
As valuable as time is, I can’t figure out why our industry gives so much of it away. We do a lot of things very well in relation to time, such as time motion calculations and studies in our production facilities, but don’t bother to track things like design time. As a result, we end up costing and eventually charging for items we track, but not for some of the most valuable services we provide to our customers.
A quick glance at our industry’s supply chain will show we are sandwiched between groups who do a fantastic job of tracking time. Take a moment to look upstream at architects and engineers. Their entire business model is based on tracking and selling time and they do it very well. Some of you may have unwittingly helped them with their billable hours by performing work they would later sell to their customer.
Take a quick look at builders. Their business model is taking materials, applying time (through labor) and delivering structures. They may make a slight profit off of their materials, but their game is judging the time it will take to build something, selling that time and then working hard to beat their estimates; another task we are more than helpful in completing.
Our immediate suppliers, the plate companies, all have engineers on staff and must have some system in place for tracking their time. I know this because whenever “Johnny Skillsaw” goes to work on chopping up my trusses I get a bill in the mail for the repair detail (and rightfully so). To my point, everyone around us is tracking time and charging for it; why do we treat design time like a sunk cost?
I’m sure some of the more “refined” component manufacturers track their design time on a project basis, but I’m just as sure they are competing against CMs who don’t track their design time. So, now that we know we have a problem, how do we go about solving it? I have a couple ideas. The first is education. We need to leverage those engaged in our industry, specifically the engineers, to teach us how a time/service business model works. I’m sure there are a bevy of best practices we could utilize and adjust for component manufacturers. I foresee a session at a future BCMC and possibly a couple webinars to help CMs better understand the concepts.
The vast majority of our design work is conducted in industry specific proprietary software. The various software suppliers (aka plate suppliers) have done an absolutely amazing job of giving us tools to design virtually and literally anything. Need proof? Check out this month’s SBC Magazine article “Taking Trusses to New Heights” about how a CM in Washington designed a church steeple.
To my second point, why hasn’t one of the software suppliers included a timer in the design software to track how long a particular design file is open? That would be a great first step towards knowing how many man-minutes (recognize that term anyone?) we have invested into a particular project. “But what about the designer who leaves the file open and then leaves his desk to help a customer?” you ask. I’m pretty sure an “idle” function could be built into the software that pauses when the mouse hasn’t moved or the design program has been minimized. We all could brainstorm a few ideas for time management improvements to the software and relay to them to the software suppliers and perhaps we should do that at the next OQM coming up next week.
Our industry is in a position that possesses a wealth of information for any given project and as a result we have an opportunity to become more and more valuable to those on each side of us in the supply chain. If we are to maximize that potential, we need to, at the very least, start tracking our time and efforts we put into the design services side of our business. Whether or not you and others in our industry decide to monetize those efforts is up to you and the free market, but we should at least know what we’re giving away.