Government Owned Company – Job Costing

A Government owned company that was set up to generate more value for the tax payer recognised a need to begin looking at optimisation and efficiency. In order to do this, they needed access to more data to begin to understand their performance and where there were potential weaknesses within their performance.

CI Projects was asked to lead the implementation of a job costing process across all services, including chargeable and non-chargeable works. The aim was to truly understand the cost of service delivery to enable continuous improvement.

Due to Coronavirus restrictions, this project had to be delivered virtually; therefore a number of sessions were held with teams remotely to communicate the process, detailing both the how and the why. This was re-communicated within the system training programme which was underway in parallel. A number of supporting documents were issued to teams to make the process as clear and efficient as possible.

Once teams began populating the information within the CAFM system, we were able to extract a report which pulled through the raw data. This was translated into a detailed Finance dashboard. This dashboard presented the data using a number of graphs – some of which are listed below:

• Process adherence (number of work orders with costs missing)
• Material costs vs labour costs
• Costs per job (by region, service type, category of establishment, per square metre, age of establishment)
• Standard deviation of total costs per square metre, material costs and labour costs

The core business-as-usual teams were engaged throughout the process and a detailed handover was carried out which ensured that once CI Projects finished supporting this project, the process was able to be sustained and further developed by the existing Finance team.

The benefits include;

• Implementation of an end to end process which would enable the organisation to capture financial data relating to operational performance
• Development of a detailed dashboard which enables clear trend analysis with formulas and conditional formatting which makes it easy to identify outliers
• The new process enabled the organisation to capture costs for 100% of their tasks, enabling clarity on service delivery costs
• By benchmarking the data and viewing standard deviation, the organisation can identify where costs are above average and therefore are able to make data-based decisions on where time and effort needs to be spent doing a deeper dive into site specific costs. This has enabled them to identify a number of opportunities to drive cost efficiency such as reviewing supply chain costs and site productivity. It also provides insights into which factors may impact the cost to deliver services.

Stephanie Hill, Finance Director says: “The work Olivia completed was a key contributor to budget management in the financial year. The work also provided insightful data to enable us to make data-driven decisions and was an enabler towards a longer-term cost recovery solution.”