This conference was held by FIATECH, an innovation-driven nonprofit in the construction industry that promotes technologies that impact the industry. They are very well regarded around the world.
In the panel I spoke on, we focused on visualization in construction. I had the pleasure of leading a discussion on the visualization of capital planning.
The Visualization of Capital Planning
When I do public speaking engagements, I try to bring something new to the conversation. I like to challenge myself when I put together a talk to bring new knowledge or insights to the subject. One of the key insights on this topic is the difference between the graphical path method and the critical path method, including why the graphical path method allows portfolio planning in a way that the critical path method does not.
In a typical planning process, an organization has a large capital construction project to budget. In this discussion, we created a test scenario in which we tried to do some planning over five years for a fictional business. It might be a pharmaceutical company, or a technology company that needs to build manufacturing plants to meet the needs of a new products that are coming out. Our goal was to decipher:
- How the business was going to use that money
- What was going to be built
- Where it was going to be built
- The particular needs of the business
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The strategic alignment of the business goals with the capital construction budget is very important. If the production facility doesn’t get built on time, then the product doesn’t get released on schedule, and revenue and market share will be lost.
We’re dealing with very time-sensitive projects – hundreds of projects over a five-year period. Each one doesn’t just need internal project coordination, it also needs coordination across the entire organization. The process of aligning the construction portfolio in a time phased manner is also quite complicated. Yet it’s vital to keep the organization on track to achieve its goals.
Typically, individual spreadsheets are used to compile requirements. Those spreadsheets are then consolidated into a single, large spreadsheet, and an attempt is made to lay out the projects over time. After that, you can estimate the capital resources required to execute that portfolio construction project over that period of time.
The hardest part is visualizing how individual projects interact within the portfolio, and estimating the cash flow requirements over that period of time. This is the problem solved by GPM in Netpoint. With Netpoint and GPM, you can create a time phase capital plan, resource load it and do what-if scenarios. All of this allows you to visualize the entire portfolio interactively in real time.
Overall, FIATECH was a great conference. It was great to meet so many incredible individuals who are leaders in the industry. My favorite moment was when Kaiser won the CETI Award for innovation. One of my friends in the industry is Mark Urquhart, who works as Regional Executive Director,Support Services and Chief Energy Officer for Kaiser. Mark is somebody that I have a great deal of respect for in the industry. He does incredible work at Kaiser Permanente and it looks like Kaiser is setting the bar for the industry.
I look forward to seeing everybody again next year at FIATECH!