Ihab Saad – Introduction to equipment management 1
AI: Summary ©
The speaker discusses a new class for construction management that covers topics such as equipment maintenance, project management, communication, and risk management. The course covers various strategies for risk management, including grading, grading, and the importance of project management. The course emphasizes managing equipment in a safe and low-pressure environment, managing contracts, and minimizing environmental impact. The speaker provides information on the process of managing equipment in a new cycle, including planning, monitoring, and control, and the use of equipment in scheduling and planning.
AI: Summary ©
Music.
Welcome to Construction Management, 329,
construction equipment. This is a new class that has been added to
the core curriculum, and it's going to be optional for those of
you who have not started
by fall, 2012 which means pretty much everyone. So let's see, what
are we going to learn in this course? The course objectives or
the topics to be covered, we're going to talk about, what's the
role of construction equipment,
what are the job site conditions that are leading or affecting the
equipment selection.
We're going to learn about equipment production trades, which
is, how many units can they produce per unit of time, or the
productivity.
We're going to learn about maintenance management, what kind
of maintenance does this equipment need? We're
going to learn about equipment economics and the decision whether
to buy, lease or rent equipment.
And hopefully, by the end of the course, you're going to achieve
these course outcomes. So you're going to understand the
performance characteristics of major pieces of equipment commonly
used in the construction industry, whether it's in earth, moving in
concrete, in any other operation on site,
you're going to be able to match equipment selection with the job
site conditions. So for which type of job site conditions should we
select? What type of equipment you're
going to be able to develop an equipment system, including major
pieces of equipment and ancillary items to satisfy construction
production equipment requirements? So once we know what's the volume
of work to be done? What's the amount of time that we have? What
are the job conditions we're going to select? What's the most
suitable piece of equipment to reach these objectives,
be able to calculate the production rates for the solid
equipment. So once we start learning, for example, about
bulldozer or loaders or tower cranes, we need to calculate
what's the cycle time and what's the production time to be able to
determine its productivity and the best use of that piece of
equipment.
We're also going to learn about understanding rolling resistance,
grade resistance and total resistance as they affect
equipment, speed, cycle times and overall production, especially
equipment that's going to be moving or rolling on the ground,
especially in construction sites, we're going to have these
different types of resistance that the equipment has to overcome,
otherwise it's not going to be able to work. So we need to learn
about these.
Know what equipment performance curves are, as we're going to see
later in the course, each piece of equipment comes with its own
user's manual that includes performance curves that show how
to estimate and how to operate according to the best performance
to achieve the best performance of the equipment.
And we're going to learn and understand how to calculate the
fixed cycle times the variable cycle times and the total cycle
times and how they affect the production rates and costs.
Because basically, if I know that the cycle time of this piece of
equipment to perform one cycle is, let's say, three minutes, then
it's gonna achieve assuming that we're working 60 minutes per hour,
which might not be true, as we're gonna learn later about
efficiency. So it's gonna have 20 cycles per hour, knowing the
capacity per cycle, that's gonna enable us to to estimate the total
production per hour, and therefore calculate the equipment needs,
understand the basic concepts of equipment maintenance. So we're
gonna get little bit into equipment costing and how to
calculate the to estimate the cost of maintenance and so on and so
forth,
and understand the economics of buying, leasing and replacing
equipment, and the associated factors of depreciation and other
owning and operational costs. All of these are going to be included
in this course.
So what about grading? How are you going to be graded? Well, refer to
the syllabus, which is already available online, and we're going
to be discussing it in class. Please go ahead and read it first.
And if you have any questions, I glad to address these.
So I'd like always, always, to start any of my classes with the
introduction about project management, and where does that
particular class fit within the big spectrum of project
management. So project management is the art and science of
delivering projects within the set parameters to satisfy the needs of
the end user, the client, the owner or the user of the project.
It incorporates the management of several separate yet interrelated
functions. So what are these functions that a project manager
needs to master.
Currently, if I ask 10 of you, what should what should be managed
in a construction project, probably nine out of the 10 are
going to respond with this, time, cost and quality. These used to be
called the triple constraint and.
Project has to be done within the available time
under budget or within the budget, and it has to meet, at least, to
meet the minimum quality requirements as specified in the
project specifications.
But now if we ask what really needs to be managed,
this is basically your job as a project manager. You have to
manage all of these areas which are the scope of the project,
because, again, the scope of the project might change from time to
time through what we know as the scope creep, which is an
incremental change, slow and incremental change in this in the
project scope. By the end of the project, you might end up with
something that's totally different from what you started with. Time
we need to manage time for the project, and that's what you learn
about in the scheduling class, how to finish the project within the
allocated period of time, and how to schedule the different
activities, the sequence, how to estimate the resources needed for
these activities and so on. Cost, of course, very much related to
time and scope, because, again,
if it's not achievable within the available budget, then we should
not bid on that project. Quality. Of course, if it does not meet the
quality standards specified by the client, the client is not going to
accept the project and will have to redo the work, which is gonna
affect time, cost and scope,
risk. There's no project without risk. We acknowledge that there's
always risk in the project. So the issue is, how are we gonna deal
with this risk? There are different strategies, different
approaches to risk management. There are different calculations
involved in risk management, whether it's qualitative
management or quantitative management, is that risk high,
medium or low? What's the probability of that risk
occurring? What's the impact if that risk occurs, and how are we
going to deal with it? Are we going to ensure it? Are we going
to mitigate it? Are we going to ignore it? And so on and so forth.
And this is a course by itself that's called Risk Management. You
might discuss that little bit in construction management, 415,
communication.
Everything that you do on a daily basis is related to communication.
You're gonna attend meetings, you're gonna write emails, you're
gonna respond to phone calls, you're gonna have conference
calls, you're gonna write memos. You're gonna read the contract,
you're gonna comment on that contract, you're gonna review the
drawings, you're gonna modify the drawings. All of these are
different modes of communication. So again, you must know about
communication management, how to manage these different modes of
communication, what's considered a pull communication, what's
considered a push communication, and so on. Again, this is
something that might be touched upon in construction management,
the class called construction management procurement.
Everything that we do in construction projects is related
to contracts. So we have a contract with the client. If I'm
the general contractor, I have a contract with the client. I have
might have a contract with the construction manager. I'm going to
have a contract with my subcontractors, or several
contracts with the subcontractors. I'm going to have several
contracts with my suppliers, etc. So how are we going to write these
contracts? How are gone? Are we going to manage or administer
these contracts in a way that minimize the probability of any
claims or any disputes that might arise in the project that might
threaten the whole completion of the project. And human resources,
again, we are dealing with both capital assets, like equipment,
for example, and we're dealing with human resources, the
personnel who are going to develop this project for us. So how to
form teams, how to recruit these teams, how to motivate these
teams, how to give them a common way of looking at the project and
synergize them, how to have incentives for that team, and in
case of
bad performance, how are we going to penalize the team members and
so on and so forth. Now these are basically eight areas of
construction management, or project management, I should say
all of these should be integrated together into a comprehensive
project management plan, and that's going to be done through
integration management. Now this is the minimum that a project
management manager needs to master. But for particular,
particularly for construction management, we're gonna add three
additional areas, and these are safety management, because again,
our construction sites, unfortunately so far, are still
relatively unsafe. We have accidents. We have injuries.
Unfortunately, we also have fatalities from time to time. So
how to have a safe environment within which we can accomplish
this, accomplish this project environment. This is the new trend
right now. Everyone's talking about sustainability. Everyone's
gone. It's talking about green systems and so on and so forth.
How can we minimize our impact on the environment, or even leave the
environment in a better condition than before developing the
project? When we talk about brown fields areas, what they have been.
Be contaminated. For example, how are we going to remediate these
fields and develop the project so that it can improve the
environment surrounding it? And finally, claims.
This is a very common thing in construction projects, and claims
by themselves are not bad, by the way. So for example, at the end of
the month, the contractor is gonna send to the owner a payment
requisition or a payment request. This is a claim. The contractor
claims that I have done this and that, and according to the
contract, I need to get that so a claim by itself is not bad. If
there's a disagreement about the claim, however it might arise into
a dispute, and this is what we're trying to avoid. So claims
management deals also with dispute management, talking about
alternative dispute resolution methods and how can we bring the
different parties to a common understanding of the project to
minimize the possibility of disputes occurring.
So as you can see, this is pretty much a comprehensive construction
management curriculum dealing with each one of these topics, or
combining some of them. Basically what you going to be doing in your
cape class. You are going to integrate all of these into one
comprehensive project management plan.
So now let us focus on our class equipment. Why manage equipment?
Well in construction projects, especially heavy commercial and
civil projects, the use of equipment is intensive. We know
that there are some projects that are
labor intensive, there are some projects that are material
intensive, there are some projects that are equipment intensive. So
especially heavy commercial and civil projects are equipment
intensive, especially on the side of lifting equipment and earth
moving equipment.
Poor equipment management as a very important aspect in the
project. Poor equipment management results in equipment condition
deterioration. So you lose the service life of the equipment. You
don't get the best utilization of that equipment. Loss of
productivity. Instead of achieving so many, let's say, cubic yards
per hour, or number of cycles per hour, you do not achieve that
goal. Safety risks, as we're going to see later on, when we address
equipment safety and how to deal with equipment. If you're working
with a crane, for example, close to power lines, what are the
precautions that you have to take into consideration, and
ultimately, any of these, or all of these combined, are going to
result in financial losses, so that all these are all signs of
poor equipment management. So knowing how to manage the
equipment hopefully, is going to make us avoid falling into the
pitfalls of poor equipment management.
What does equipment management involve? It includes equipment
planning. So what type of equipment to use, like the size,
capacity, production, rate, cost, schedule of acquisition and
utilization. When do I need to bring that equipment to site? When
do I need to rent that equipment or to lease it, mixing and
matching of different types of equipment to achieve optimum
performance and productivity. For that particular batch plant, how
many transit mixers am I going to need? And for these transit mixers
to achieve optimum productivity, how many tower cranes am I going
to need? How many buckets within the tower crane and so on,
decisions on equipment, purchasing versus renting or leasing, when
would it be better to purchase the equipment and when it would it be
better to just rent it or lease it for immediate term? It also
includes equipment monitoring, so collecting actual data about
equipment cycle times, productivity and production rates,
as well as cost calculations. In our initial plan. We had some
targets. We had some goals. What we need to ensure during project
execution is, are we achieving these goals or not? We estimate
that this equipment is going to have a certain cycle time. Is that
the actual cycle time that we're getting from that piece of
equipment. So planning is the first step into management. The
second step is monitoring, which is collecting actual data, and the
third step is control. Finally, equipment control, which is
comparing the actual performance to the planned rates and adjusting
the plans accordingly. From time to time, we're gonna find that we
have some deviations or some discrepancies or some variances,
so we need to adjust our plan based on the actual performance,
and know exactly what are the reasons for this variance, so that
we do not repeat the same mistake for future projects. And this
control part closes the feedback loop and results in a new cycle of
planning. So based on my control, there's going to be a new decision
for the new projects or for the remaining part of that particular
project,
in conclusion, equipment are a great resource that can make or
break a project, especially the ones that are equipment intensive.
The project manager, although not necessarily a mechanical engineer,
is responsible for the proper selection, utilization and
maintenance of the equipment.
Equipment. As a project manager, you control the whole site,
and that's basically it for this class. I hope you enjoyed learning
about the basics of construction equipment, and I'll meet you in
next class. You.