Trending and Forecasting in Construction Operations

This paper presents a study conducted in collaboration with large Canadian engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) firm to identify areas of improvement in the current process of progress reporting and forecasting project status at different targeted future dates. The study focused mainly on trending and time/Cost control of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) projects. It encompassed a field study of the practices of the industrial collaborator, study of related materials from the literature, and development of standalone computer applications, which serves as add-on utilities to the propriety project management software of the industrial partner. The paper presents a model for improving trending and forecasting of time and cost in construction operations. The proposed model has 3 main functions: 1) trending of estimate accuracy, 2) integrated control and forecasting, and 3) progress visualization. @Risk 5.0 for excel, Windows SharePoint Server and visual basic for application (VBA) are used to develop 3 add-on tools to implement the developments made in the above 3 functions. Numerical examples based on a set of data from a pilot training project, developed by the industrial partner, are presented to illustrate the essential features of the developed model.