11
O P I N I O N
Increasing utilization
It’s not about taking one step, but about taking 10. This could also be painful, but there’s a lot of additional revenue on the back end.
T he employee utilization rate is one of a handful of key performance indicators used by AEC firms to measure the ability of the firm to keep employees working on billable projects. Firms are busier right now than I have seen in more than a decade, so I have to ask, if everyone is so busy, why do so many firms struggle to hit utilization targets?
June Jewell GUEST SPEAKER
“Hitting utilization targets involves careful attention to time management, employee assignments, scheduling best practices, and communication.”
Your employees are your firm’s primary asset and optimizing their performance and use of their time will make the difference between low or high project profit margins. For a 100-person AEC firm, just a 1 percent increase in utilization is about $225,000 in additional revenue per year. So why do so many firms fail to hit utilization targets and keep their billable staff fully utilized? There are really only a handful of reasons that utilization is not optimized: ❚ ❚ Poor and/or inaccurate time management ❚ ❚ Lack of direction/focus on non-billable time
❚ ❚ Lack of scheduling processes ❚ ❚ Inability to forecast ❚ ❚ Poor communication with staff
See JUNE JEWELL, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 9, 2018, ISSUE 1255
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