Factory cost and project cost never meet
The plant reports cost per unit and the project ledger reports contract margin, and because the two are built on different bases neither explains the other.
Modular buildings
Factory economics and project margin in the same set of numbers
Manufacturing cost, project delivery and hire fleet utilisation reconciled, so a job is priced on what it costs to build and install rather than on a standard rate.
Modular sits awkwardly between manufacturing and construction, and its reporting usually inherits the worst of both: a factory measuring units and a project ledger measuring contracts, with no shared view of what a job actually cost. Add a hire fleet and there is a third set of economics again. We join the factory, the project and the fleet so margin is visible per job and per unit, and so utilisation is measured on the assets rather than estimated.
Discuss your operationWhat we usually find
The problems that come up in almost every one of these businesses.
Transport and installation are absorbed
Delivery, craneage and site works are pooled into overhead rather than attached to the job that incurred them, which flatters the difficult jobs and penalises the simple ones.
Fleet utilisation is a spreadsheet
Hire units on site, in transit, in refurbishment and idle are tracked by hand, so the return on the fleet is an estimate nobody quite trusts.
Where we start
What the first engagement usually covers.
Scope depends on the state of your systems. These are the pieces that recur in this sector.
Cost per unit built
Materials, labour and factory overhead attributed to the unit and the production run that consumed them.
Job margin end to end
Factory cost, transport, installation and site works joined to contract revenue, so margin is known per job rather than per contract type.
Fleet utilisation and yield
Where every hire unit is, what it earns and what refurbishment costs, tracked rather than reconstructed.
Pricing evidence
What the last year of delivered jobs says the rate card should be, by building type and site condition.
What changes
What is different afterwards.
You own all of it: the code, the written definitions and documentation aimed at whoever maintains this after us.
- Cost per unit reconciled to the ledger
- Job margin including transport and installation
- Fleet utilisation and yield measured, not estimated
- A rate card backed by delivered job costs
The builds behind it
Sector knowledge decides the order. The builds are the same four.
Single source of truth
Your finance, customer and operational records joined into one dataset, with each figure defined once and traceable back to the system it came from.
Analytics layer
Reporting built on top of the joined data, aimed at the few revenue and cost drivers that actually change the result.
Workflows
One defined task, automated inside a process that already exists, measured against whatever it replaced.
Financial modelling
Driver-based models built on the same definitions as your reporting, so the forecast and the actuals stop disagreeing.
Worth asking
Questions this tends to answer.
- What does a unit actually cost us to build and install?
- Which job types are we underpricing?
- What is the hire fleet really returning?
- Where is refurbishment eating the margin?