Key performance indicators for business administration are a crucial instrument for management to guarantee sustained business success. The degree to which management monitors its key performance indicators is another indicator of entrepreneurial success.
Ideal corporate planning allows the engineering office to freely select its orders and guarantees that precisely the proper amount of workers, resources, and orders are available at any given time.
In the white paper, you can find out more about digital solutions in practice. In addition, we use Werner Consult as an example to show how Engineering offices from a business software benefit:
Year Numbers
The annual figures initially play a minor role in ensuring business success. Because they are only available at the end of a year – too late to make effective corrections:
- Key performance indicators (financial statements, taxes)
- Liquidity ratios (cash ratio)
- Profitability indicators (return on equity, return on investment)
- Balance sheet ratios (equity ratio, debt ratio)
- Key figures for turnover capacity (capital turnover capacity)
The annual figures are particularly relevant to the long-term orientation of the company. A comparison with the figures from previous years provides insights into the long-term development of the company. When it comes to FPA, you must take a look at FPA solutions comparisons here: https://acterys.com/top-10-fpa-solutions-comparison/.
Permanent Numbers
Running numbers are a crucial tool for gaining an overview of the value creation architecture and making course corrections if necessary. The following key figures are relevant, among others:
- Amount of orders still open
- Ongoing correct evaluation of half-finished services
- Expenses used (working hours and cost)
- Degrees of completion of the projects
- Resource utilization
Engineers can determine the degree of completion of their respective project phases “in their sleep”: preliminary draft 30% completed, submission 45% complete, and more. But the trick is to combine this key figure meaningful reporting tool and thus know exactly how and where each individual project stands at the push of a button.
This ensures better planning and overview right from the start and is therefore one of the most important foundations for success.
Source: thinkingportfolio.com
Resource and Capacity Planning
Business success requires one sustainable resource and capacity planning in advance. The goal is to know at any time which resources are planned as planned. When it comes to resource planning, engineers are faced with the following challenges:
- Complex planning ─ Orders to engineering offices are often complex and time-consuming. Time, personnel, plant, and material resources must therefore be well thought out and planned efficiently.
- Un-plannability of individual variables ─ Not every detail of an engineering project can be planned. The longer a construction project lasts, the more likely it is that there will be shifts of various kinds, such as schedule changes or changes in the workforce.
- Timeliness ─ Resource planning is only helpful if it is based on current figures and is easy to use. Managing resource planning is often unnecessarily complicated. Then the time required and the likelihood of errors increase. But above all, the acceptance of labor-intensive resource planning by the project managers.
- Complex tools ─ Planning software for engineers is often over- or under-complex. Project planners are therefore generally skeptical about modern digital solutions for resource planning. The only solution here is to use a demo version of the business solution to be evaluated that has already been tailored to the company. Ideally, this can be seamlessly transferred to the executable version.
- Impact on liquidity ─ Liquidity planning and resource planning are closely linked: delays in the project lead to late payments and have a direct impact on liquidity. Every change in resource planning also requires consideration of liquidity.
- Non-technical challenge ─ Because of the non-technical background and the associated effort for training, many engineers are afraid of resource planning in this regard, for example Subcontractors, back.
- Lack of unified solutions ─ Best-of-breed solutions prove to be inefficient for resource planning. With a best-of-suite solution, you create a central location for the collection and automatic evaluation of current company data. If an intelligent system is missing, the manual effort required for evaluation and control increases massively.
Source: adfor.it
Order Management and Project Controlling
Continuous project controlling and order management are often perceived as time-consuming in engineering offices. In fact, administrative tasks take up a significant proportion of knowledge workers’ weekly working hours. Those responsible in engineering offices are therefore confronted with numerous challenges:
- Many individual projects with different requirements have to be brought under one roof,
- Internal and external employees must be brought to the same table despite physical and operational distance to ensure high-quality and on-time deliveries,
- Projects often extend over months or years,
- Flexibility in resource planning is necessary to meet dynamic changes in project requirements.
Good project control is crucial for successful, profitable project completion and thus long-term business success. It is also so difficult because many engineering offices rely on a best-of-breed solution. Instead of a uniform and central system, different tools are used for various issues. One of the disadvantages of this is that it makes exchanging data so complicated. In contrast, a best-of-suite solution has many advantages.
Source: acumine.com
Advantages of Best-of-suite in Engineering Offices
All projects are managed in one system – this makes it easier for project management and management to have an overview.
- Possible financial holes can be identified and plugged at an early stage.
- The ERP software continuously collects data that is available to everyone involved in real time around the clock to understand the project status.
- A consistent system from quote creation to project completion creates a “single point of truth”. You don’t have to spend time comparing data and queries from multiple systems.
- The universal availability of up-to-date data improves customer service through faster response times, for example when issuing offers and invoicing.
- The room for errors and data loss is minimized through the intelligent networking of various tools.
