Production Trends gives teams a fast way to gain the insight they need into how their performance is trending over time, as well as which cost codes are performing the best and worst. It will allow PMs to quickly make decisions on how to adjust resource allocation to ensure their jobs stay on schedule and on budget.
For Subcontractors, production is everything—so understanding your team’s efficiency, identifying problem areas where work is slowing, and visualizing which codes are at risk, on track, or even under budget can be critical to ensuring profitability. Many teams struggle to make these assessments and adjust in real-time while projects are ongoing, so they may not know how to course-correct until it’s far too late. Those teams who do have a method for quantifying their real-time efficiency also struggle because the process often involves lots of manual computation across different systems, taking away precious time from the actual work of completing the project.
Setting Up Production Insights
Create a new project and be sure to create at least one cost code with a budget. In most cases, users will maintain robust lists of cost code budgets with hours and materials assigned.
Once cost codes and an associated budget have been added to the project, the trends chart will automatically appear with the rest of the Production Insights data.
Trends charts will appear the same regardless if users are leveraging material tracking alongside the Automatic Production Tracking or the Manual Production Tracking.
Using the Chart
There are three states that the Trends chart can support: the default All Codes state, the Single-Code state, and the Multi-Code state.
All Codes State: This is the default state that the Trends chart will appear in when Production Insights is launched. It displays a rollup of all production data across the project at once. This is essentially a visual representation of the week-over-week values of the data in the All-Time Stats we display at the top of Production Insights. In this view, there are four bars per week representing Actual Hours, Budgeted Hours, Projected Total Hours, and Projected Gain/Loss for each week on the chart.
Single Code State: Like the All Codes state, this view displays four bars per week representing Actual Hours, Budgeted Hours, Projected Total Hours, and Projected Gain/Loss for each week, but only for a single selected cost code. The chart will switch to this view as soon as a user selects a single cost code from the code selector dropdown.
Multi-Code State: Unlike the other two states, the multi-code state only displays the Projected Gain/Loss week over week in a line chart, but it does so for up to five selected cost codes. The chart will switch to this view as soon as a user selects more than one cost code from the code selector dropdown.
Using the Chart Filter
In the top right of the chart is the cost code selector. Clicking on this dropdown will display a list of project cost codes broken into the categories At Risk, On Track, and Under Budget.
Important to note, only codes with both Budgeted AND Actual hours will be displayed in the cost code selector as codes without one or the either cannot truly be considered to fall into one of those categories.
At Risk (PTH >= BH*1.1): These codes are the problem areas on the job as they are projected to fall at 110% of the budget or greater and are therefore listed right at the top.
Please note that some codes with small budgets could fall into this category even though the actual amount of hours over budget are relatively trivial. For example, a cost code budgeted at 10 hours with projected total hours of 12 based on the completed work would be considered At Risk even though it is only projected at 2 hours over budget.
On Track (BH*0.9 < PTH < BH*1.1): These codes are doing well overall and are projected to fall between 90% and 110% of the budgeted hours, but should be monitored to ensure they stay on schedule.
Under Budget (PTH <= BH*0.9): These codes have made great progress on the job so far and are projected to be completed in 90% or less of the budgeted hours. They should be used as examples and the job site procedures and methodology used to achieve those results should be replicated in similar tasks and work areas that are struggling.
Requirements
In order to set up and view Production Insights charts, you must have access to the Production Tracking features available on either the Professional or Performance plans.
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