Keep control of your costs with project management software

15 July 2021

Whilst increasing the visibility of your projects and improving your productivity are often drivers for implementing project management software, another is the ability to tightly control the costs involved.

We know that project costs can spiral; whether it’s taking longer than anticipated to deliver or using more raw materials. There are so many different ways that you can produce waste within a project.

It’s important to track the time spent and materials used on a project to understand exactly how profitable you are.

The cost of delays

Delays are one of the biggest causes of spiralling costs. It may be that you’ve coordinated resources to be available at a certain time, only for the project not to be at the right stage to carry out the works.

Not only does this waste time on site, but the materials may well be perishable, resulting in an additional cost for the materials when they can be used.

Take a concrete pour as a prime example. If your supplier arrives on site, and you’re not in a position to pour the concrete, you’ll need to purchase additional supplies when you are actually ready.

This could easily be avoided by utilising project management software to inform suppliers of delays in the project and therefore not incur additional costs.

The cost of inefficient processes

The key to controlling your costs and profitability is the utilisation of your resources. Having team members sat around waiting is inefficient and costly.

Tracking the time it takes to complete a task on a project will help you understand the true cost of completing that project, and how you could improve the utilisation of your resources.

It may even help to identify bottlenecks in your processes that underutilisation of your resources.

If you’re able to track the time spent on a project, you’ll get a clear idea of the cost to complete the project and compare it to the actual costs of delivering the project.

The key difference being that if you’re having to hire equipment for 3 days, but only utilising the use of that equipment for 8 hours, there’s potential wastage there that could be eliminated to reduce your costs.

Tracking your costs and utilisation in project management software will help you identify those opportunities to tighten your processes and control your costs.

Summary

The keyword when tracking costs is waste. Identifying waste and potential opportunities to eliminate waste from your processes will give you full control of your costs and therefore your profitability.

It’s vital that we maximise our potential in this way, and the easiest way to track your costs and eliminate process waste is to start recording your activity.

With businesses of all shapes and sizes trying to do more with less, how are you going to utilise your resources better?

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