The following is an imaginary example of a State Highway Contracts departmental planning and scheduling. Lets assume a contract’s development flows sequentially through the Engineering, Accounting, and Legal departments before being finally approved by management. In the Engineering department you many have several operations going on at the same time: “cuts and fills” measured in cubic yards of earth moved, “blasting operations” measured in tons removed, and “roadways built” measured in cubic yards of concrete poured or asphalt laid. The engineering calculations for the contract when completed go to Accounting for their input and from there to the Legal department and final approval.

The objective is to achieve a balanced workload in the Contracts department and prevent lost time from waiting. First we need to time-study all of the processes in all of the departments in three categories: a large job, a medium sized job, and a small job. Then analyze the results of each of the time studies. What we are looking for is the effect of different sized jobs on each department. The time to complete the engineering calculations is directly affected by the amount of earth moved and less upon concrete poured. For Accounting the processing time may vary in a direct percentage to amount of earth moved. If it does not then a graph with a cost curve should be created for the work load planners enabling them to easily pickoff the chart the correct accounting work load based on engineering’s measurements. The Legal department’s review time may vary directly or as in the case of Accounting a graph may also be made. Additional time may be required by all departments where blasting occurs and is calculated using the same method as above and added to the above.

Office job planning begins by the Planner getting the best estimate from engineering of cubic feet of earth moved in each contract these estimates are usually available from preliminary engineering studies. With this as a basis the planner can calculate the workload in succeeding departments accounting and legal. He may use either a direct percentage to calculate the correct time or he may pick the correct time from a graph as stated above. The difference between this method and estimating the work time for all departments is you are starting with and using only one estimate.

With a more accurate time to complete each of the contract processing steps we can not only plan for a balanced work load we can begin to manage the processes. To keep the office work plan on schedule and prevent slippage the office planner needs to monitor the progress of the work-in-process by checking twice a day with the management of each department. Each week the supervisor of each department develops a work plan to monitor work progress. The department’s work-in-process is listed by job on a time scaled chart. Each job’s progress is marked on the chart by the supervisor and it is immediately known if the job is progressing on time or is falling behind. This enables the manager to take timely corrective measurers including providing overtime to get back on schedule. This prevents a single department’s failure to meet schedule from upsetting the workload balance and causing wait time, lost time, in all the other departments.