Introduction

Hi, it's Will from Gather. Today I'm going to show you how to use your site diary to give you real time commercial assurance.

Planned vs actual

The graphs in front of you look nice and pretty. What they actually show is planned and actual comparisons for costs from labour, plant, and hours worked as well. You can understand how that relates back to your overall forecast budgets and cost allocations.

Let's start with how it's built up. We get our information from our typical records, which is from step three in Gather on labour and materials. We can see here that it's built up, as you can see in front of us. We've got our people here: Nick, Joe, Alex and Elena, the role that they undertake and their supplier. This allows us to understand their rate.

We've got their shift times as well in step one. We can see when the shift starts and the duration of the shift. From this we know it's a midweek day, a weekend, midweek night, even a bank holiday or special rate.

We can also do the same for plant. We've got the suppliers again. We've got the materials being provided. We've got all that information here. That gives us our cost of work done for every single shift record.

Digging into the detail

Let's go back to our key insights. An example: here is our project overview. We can see we've got that planned cost. We've imported our planning. We forecast what we thought this project was going to cost. We've got our cumulative actual today as well. We can filter it by different weeks. But this is the overall project.

Digging into the detail, we can see we've got labour and the plant as well. We can see what we planned to spend on labour. So far, we are 97% of the budget through. So it's not looking too good. The plant is much, much lower. So yeah, you can start to see where those peaks and troughs are and a lot of differences.

We can also do a comparison by hours worked. This is labour and plant together. We can filter it with just labour or plant as well. Again, we're quite far through our planned hours. It looks a little bit different to what we expected.

Interpreting trends

Going to this graph here, we can start to see the yellow line is cumulative planned costs, and cumulative actual costs. Quite interesting there. You might think: oh, we're under budget. But commonly, when you see this sort of angle on a curve, you probably see this project is going a lot longer. You need to dig into it and start to see those spends.

We can use WBS, P6 reference, to understand cost allocation by package, and that's really useful for us to do. We can start to see where we're spending our money.

Real time CVR

When I was a QS, what I would have loved is to be able to do a real time CVR. I can start to do that here. So let's filter for a particular week. Say, week commencing 20 November. We can start to see plan versus actual: the planned hours, actual hours, and the total hours as well.

Do the same for plant. So we can start to see that sort of information again. We'll choose the same week for our particular plant groups: dumpers, dozers, that sort of thing are all in there. What I quite like is our cost allocation, so we can start to see our actual costs against our planned cost profile. We can start to see where we're winning and where we're losing.

Conclusion

Have a look at this. It's available to everyone on the Gather platform. Just make sure you're capturing the labour, plant and materials as we've got here. There you go.

Thank you for watching.

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