Jeff Blasdell presented a “webinar” on analyzing and trending job cost. These tools allow the PM and DM’s to evaluate job costs from a broad perspective and determine when and where a job is getting into trouble. This is a reverse angle perspective the production tracking. Production tracking is pro-active and job cost trending is best used for “after the fact” evaluation. Using COINS reports to excel, pivot tables, and graphs, we are able to compare our baseline estimate with actual job cost running totals to create a polynomial trend-line which in turn depicts moving averages to actual costs and compares to baseline budgets. These tools are very useful when evaluating a project from a cost analytical perspective. We also stressed the importance of selecting the correct vendor number when issuing a purchase order. Per Dinah Smith (AP) this has been an ongoing problem.
