Masonry Magazine February 2003 Page. 35
MASONRY COMPUTER ESTIMATING
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by Tradesmen's Software
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CIRCLE 163 ON READER SERVICE CARD
February 2003
Masonry 33
THE VOICE OF THE MASON CONTRACTOR
Good documentation will have the added reward of tightening up your resources and recovering more in change orders, all as a matter of the natural outcome of a good labor tracking system.
claim and that the claim should fail for failure to track losses directly. It's a pretty compelling argument and certainly something that works against you in negotiations.
The way to avoid this problem is with pro-active claims management. By treating the information from the field a little more like data, which can help you, and less like the drudgery of paperwork, you will find that you're ready for almost any eventuality of cost overrun. The data collected from good field notes not only escapes the problems of a Total Cost Claim but it puts you in the stronger position of an Actual Cost Claim.
Actual Cost Claims present a direct causal link between the event in the field and the cost overrun you seek to recover. For example, if a material lift is down for two hours, stalling your material on the ground along with four workers, your direct costs would be four men at two hours, or eight hours of labor. These are actual costs and differ significantly from total costs. In a total cost argument, you would demand the overrun for the entire job and say part of it was down time for material lifts.
Most subcontractors are resistant to preparing better documentation in the field, believing that better documentation means more paperwork. That's not so. With a good project tracking system in place, data can be developed from the tracking system whenever and wherever you want. Like a roll of exposed, yet undeveloped film, you know what pictures are there but you don't have to develop them unless they are needed.
A simple and effective system is all you really need to combat the total cost defense for mason contractors, Good documentation will have the added reward of tightening up your resources and recovering more in change orders, all as a matter of the natural outcome of a good labor tracking system.
There are many ways to track your labor but the trick is to track your labor so that you can tell on any given day (ideally) how many block were installed, where and with how many man-hours (or crew-hours). If you think about the big modern prisons with their hundreds of cells and sprawling housing pods, tracking labor in detail seems like it would be an overwhelming task. Especially if you have to keep it up every day and want to still have time to see the family between shifts.
In order to easily track progress, the measuring tools must be kept in a language your field crews can speak and understand. In the case of mason contractors that means the project drawings. The most efficient way for a mason contractor to track its labor in the field is by identifying labor hours by drawing sheet number and grid line. If the project allows, it is simple enough to number the walls on each sheet as well.
The foreman does not have to count the blocks in the walls because this was already done, either directly or indirectly, in