The “Time Studies” were introduced by F W Taylor and enhanced further by Gilbreths’ “Motion studies”, to the industrial world more than 100 years ago. The purpose of these “Time and motion studies” was to find the standard time to do a particular task. The studies led to removal of redundancies, reduction in the costs and improvement in the efficiency.
These techniques suffered sharp criticism in those days. However, the approach is still relevant and still used in a modified format in service sector like healthcare, education etc.
In case of professionals, each service package is likely to be unique and different for each customer and therefore F Taylor’s Time and motion studies may not be useful in deciding how much time a person should take to complete a task. Besides, the level of experience, skills etc. required for such unique service may also complicate the decision making further.
Eff factor approaches the problem of efficiency from a totally different angle. It uses a feature called Budgeted Bill Value for this and uses the billing rates fixed smartly as explained in the previous articles (link) to help you decide who will spend how much time on various tasks involved in a particular job.
This is how it works.
At the time of creation of a new project in EFF Factor, you are expected to state expected fees from the job. Then you assign different people to different tasks, based on your judgement, and also specify time required to do the task. During this process, EFF Factor constantly displays, the bill values of these person-wise task time. This total Budgeted Bill Value is to be compared with the expected fees and is normally not to be allowed to cross the same.
If Budgeted Bill value crosses the expected fees, you try and bring it to accepted level, by reducing the time allocated to the tasks or finding a cheaper person.
Thus, this Simple feature of Budgeted Bill value will allow you to fix how much time should be spent on each task by different persons to ensure that your profit target for the project and also of the firm, is achieved.
Thus, Budgeted Bill value feature brings objectivity and discipline in budgeting or assigning of people with simplicity and fair amount of uniformity without any rigidity.
It allows greater delegation of power and greater involvement of people at all levels as decided by the top management.
One must not forget that, even after proper budgeting, there may be slippages, deviations which if not tracked and acted upon in time may adversely affect your profit targets. But EFF Factor’s real-time tracking / reporting system will ensure timely intervention by the right person in right time.
Profitability Monitor is designed just for that.
To discover more, please contact us on +919892128838 or mail us on contact@efffactor.com
