Cycle time is the time that it takes for a work process to be successfully completed, from start to finish. For Pavement Maintenance professionals, crew cycle time (CCT) is a measure of a crew’s speed at work.
For the seal coating contractor, one cycle time measured is the time needed to completely clean and prepare a lot for seal coating. For the paving contractor, one CCT could be the time it takes to complete the ground preparation and a second CCT, the time spent placing the base for a 2-in. overlay. For the sweeping contractor, it could represent the time used for a truck to sweep the average 50,000 square feet of parking space at a strip mall.
In manufacturing, a plant manager realizes that if the cycle time to produce a product should be 15 minutes, and the actual time is taking twenty or thirty minutes, something is preventing the estimated completion. Such interruptions could be the result of faulty equipment, lack of maintenance, or poorly trained operators. Such interruptions are common to pavement maintenance contractors.
If you could more accurately predict, within a reasonable tolerance of time, the time it takes for your crews to complete each work process, you would provide more accurate estimates of costs and schedule.
How do you measure your crew’s cycle time? To begin, write the steps involved with completing the different processes employed to complete work, e.g. ground prep, installing materials, clean-up, loading and unloading, etc. Create “workflow charts” that utilize symbols to represent action, decisions, beginning points, ending points, etc.
No matter whether you list your job procedures line-by-line or use graphics, make sure that the entire job process is complete, and each step is included. For the paving crew this first effort might identify each step in cleaning a job site as one work process. Then, you might list each step involved with laying the asphalt for a particular square footage of space. You might follow-up this effort with the steps involved with rolling out the new material. Finally, you could identify the needed steps to clean-up and pull off the lot.
The second effort requires you to identify the actual time that it takes to complete each process step described in the previous paragraph. If you do not have this information, you will need to complete a time study of any process step in question.
Contractors often challenge how difficult it is to measure production time when performing work. For many of these same challenges, I’ve found that many contractors have never attempted to measure the time to complete a work process. Another reason contractors balk at timing work processes is due to their feeling that they already know how much time it should take to complete a work process.
A third challenge some contractors raise is that “no two jobs are ever the same.” While most jobs are a bit different, we still need to get an accurate picture of how effective and efficient our crews are working. Are they only productive on the big, open, and easy to pave jobs but we lose our shorts on islands or funky landscaping patterns? This is more reason why we need to measure our crews’ capabilities.
Completing a time study is not difficult. Using a stopwatch, record the start time your crew begins a particular step and the completion time. To provide you with some level of confidence about the cycle time of a process, you should measure the same process step on several jobs and then take the average of the times recorded. Once you are confident that the average time for a particular step is secure, establish this time as your cycle time for the step or process that was timed.
One secret measuring effort I’ve used before is to measure the average time a paving crew can place eight ton, then sixteen ton, then thirty-two ton, etc. Having a breakdown of tonnage can then help estimates be more accurate. You could measure your seal coat crew on applying one coat per ten thousand square feet or other increments of square footage that you find more common.
When you are developing a cycle time standard for a process, be sure that the steps used to complete the process are the same. If you record the same process three different times, and the order of completing the process is different each time, you will potentially bias the average time. Such a miscalculation could prevent you from establishing a dependable time to base your customer bids and job scheduling. For example, compare lots that have no islands against lots with islands. Then, measure your crews on similar size lots with two to four islands. Bunch similar type jobs together so you are confident in the benchmarking of lots.
Cycle times can be established for any process. Once you have established cycle times, be sure to inform your employees. Cycle times should become the standard operating goals for completing jobs. Then, when processes take longer than expected to complete, compared to your cycle time standard, questions should be raised as to the causes for the additional time. Remember, time is money…I mean faster cycle time is money!
For more information on establishing cycle times for your crews contact Brad Humphrey of Pinnacle Development Group. You may contact Brad by visiting www.pinnacledg.com.
