De-risking the Labor Shortage — It’s All About Flow

By Sandy Hamby, AIA, CCM, FCMAA, NAC, CEO, President at MOCA Systems, Inc.

Persistent labor shortages combined with ongoing supply chain uncertainty can greatly increase the risks of construction project delays, accidents and litigation. In years past, materials and equipment were more readily available, as were the sufficient trade skills needed for their installation. Now, those supply chain inputs have long lead times and volatile delivery schedules and it has never been harder to flow the right skills to the right place at the right time to install them efficiently and safely.

The labor flow problem is a data problem. When the information in the contract schedule and production plan are out of sync, the quality and timeliness of critical decisions suffer, both in the office and in the field. And this is inevitable with the manual, ad hoc production planning methods traditionally used in the field. Superintendents and trade foremen often struggle with the efficient task assignment, sequencing and execution needed to match the unpredictable arrival of materials and equipment and master planners and schedulers lack the timely, accurate visibility of labor availability and utilization needed to maintain the contract schedule.

Across the industry, the consequences of this data problem are many, including:

Trade Stacking — Worker productivity declines and safety risks1 increase when multiple trade crews must be assigned to work in the same area at the same time to stay on schedule.

This happens when supply chain data is out of sync with labor availability data and when master schedulers and production planners lack a shared, timely, collaborative view of all project data.

Rework — Data in the contract schedule about the work to be done on the project can be quite general and is often ambiguous and production planners must frequently implement their best guess regarding labor scheduling and assignment. As a result, it is not uncommon for certain work to be done out of sequence with other integral tasks. That work must then be redone, resulting in needlessly increased project costs and delays.

Productivity Loss Litigation — With costly trade skills in such short supply, specialty contractors must use their available workforce more carefully than ever. But when a general contractor uses manual production planning, errors in trade crew scheduling can easily occur. Sometimes this results in a large trade crew idle on the jobsite for hours or hastily relocated to other, often faraway projects. This can bring significant additional costs to the specialty contractor that they must try to claw back through litigation against the general contractor.

The solution to these and many other problems is what we call Digital Labor Flow Optimization. DLFO replaces ad hoc, manual production planning with easy-to-use software that can be shared by owners, master schedulers