Practus’ assisted the design and consulting firm in implementing a time sheeting tool within 10 weeks of engagement commencement and reducing TAT to provide price quotations to customers from ~6 days to ~2 days.
| Client Name | Industry | Ownership | Management | No. of Employees | ROI On Fee | Size | Project Duration |
| A design and consulting firm | Engineering and Designing Consulting | Privately Held | Owner Managed | 200 | 5.5x | $35 million | 4 months |
About The Company
Project Freddo is a design and consulting firm in the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) for HVAC industry. Manpower constituted ~55% of the revenue.
Practus’ Role
- Employees were classified according to their function (design, drawing, bidding/contracting, procurement, and delivery), involvement (committed to single projects, supervisory across projects), and location (onsite, regional offices, head office).
- To begin with, time was recorded in a Google Doc, which later evolved into a SaaS-based time sheeting solution.
- “Standard” output documentation and management sign-off for key positions in all functions.
- Timesheet data is reviewed weekly to discover data mistakes and inconsistencies.
- Creation of a time-code to track time by activity.
- Creating an Excel application to combine time data with payroll data in order to calculate project-level costs.
- The rationale for the cost allocation for the shared head office and regional offices to be documented.
- Design and deployment of a dashboard to track budget and actual project expenditures.
Impact Delivered
- A time sheeting technology was installed within 10 weeks of the engagement’s start.
- Accurate project-level profitability led to price discussions on ~11% of customer contracts by number and ~27% by value, increasing realizations by ~6% and gross margins by $3 million.
- Within four months, we had completed project-level profitability assessments for 100 percent of high-value projects and 65 percent of mid-value projects.
- The TAT for providing price quotations to customers has been reduced from ~6 days to ~2 days.
- The time it took to create quotations was decreased from ~8 to ~4.5 man-days, saving the FP and A team about $260,000 in yearly wage expenditures.
- Within four months of the engagement’s start, Practus successfully developed a cloud-based time tracking application and covered it with a strong marginal costing system, initially on Excel and subsequently on the cloud .
- The involvement of Practus significantly enhanced visibility into the true cost of developing and delivering projects, employee productivity, and project level profitability.