The How-To Guide For Prefab Leaders: Actively Manage Your Prefab Schedule
In this How-To Guide for Prefab Leaders, we review how to generate a schedule forecast and factory production plan and how to manage the prefab project cycle to ensure that you are hitting the schedule targets. We review how to leverage technology like Offsight to manage prefab project delivery in real-time and to track factory production, live, to ensure you are meeting your deadlines. If production falls behind schedule, we will review how to take proactive steps to accelerate work and how to better understand the cost implications of these corrective actions.
Generate Your Prefab Project Schedule
We begin by generating the project schedule and factoring in labor capacity constraints. These constraints also apply to the unique prefabrication process for the products you are assembling. With Offsight’s pre-built prefab planning, forecasting and estimating templates, you can define your prefabrication process by your product type (e.g. EIFS panels, bath pods, volumetric modules, etc).
Once each process step is identified and hours are assigned to complete each process, you can then add your current labor resources and capacity constraints to generate an accurate factory production schedule with forecasted start and end dates. Projected delivery dates by collection of modules or bundles of panels (e.g. 1st floor, 2nd floor, etc) can then be provided to other project stakeholders to coordinate on-site installation.
Compare Real-Time Production with Your Planned Schedule
After building your forecasted schedule, you leverage technology like Offsight to track your progress from the shop floor, against your prefab schedule. As operators actively work on products on the shop floor and products move through assembly you can actively tracks status in real time through a mobile app to gain visibility. In order to compare your real time progress against your planned project schedule, you will need to overlay your live production Gantt over your plan.
With Offsight’s Schedule and Analytics Dashboard, you can automatically pull a real time production Gantt chart for all live products on the floor and track when they start prefabrication. It’s important to also track the production status of all live products in the overall assembly, including which processes were completed e.g. framing, and which are still pending and where these processes stand against their forecasted start and end dates.
Identify Schedule Delays and Correcting Course
By automatically linking forecasted product start and end dates, in a digital tool like Offsight, by process and workstation, you can see how each individual product or module is tracking against your plan. Thereby you could track a large modular project by individual module or collection of modules, e.g. floor 1, and immediately identify when production is falling behind your schedule.
In this manner all operators, team leads and supervisors can see when products and processes need to be completed to achieve your schedule targets. If updates to your forecasted schedule are needed to account for delays, a digital solution will allow you to easily move the target start and end dates in your plan. This will ensure you are always tracking your progress and managing prefabrication against your overall project schedule.
By leveraging technology like Offsight to communicate updates to all stakeholders in real time, you can enable collaboration and coordination throughout the project lifecycle.
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