Fixed-price fabrication jobs overrun for one of two reasons: a bad estimate or wasted execution hours. Most businesses absorb the loss without diagnosing which.
The project manager saying the job is fine is giving you an operational update. On fixed-price bespoke work, that is not the same as commercial oversight.
Most bespoke engineering businesses have no mechanism to make margin loss visible until the job closes. By then it is too late. This piece works through what live tracking actually looks like and what it costs when it is absent.
The scope conflict between a contractor's delivery scope and the customer's expectation is almost never created in the kickoff meeting. It is created upstream in purchasing, by someone who never met the delivery engineer. Here is the mechanism and the only protection that works.
Most businesses that lose final account disputes on fixed-price engineering contracts do not lose them because the client's position is valid. They lose them because nobody built the case before the first negotiation call. Here is what building the case actually means.
On a ten-week conveyor or fabrication project, the first complete financial picture arrives in the month-end report for a job that finished a fortnight ago. At that point the director is not managing a project. He is reading a record of one. Here is the structural problem and what the alternative actually looks like.
More articles on commercial project control, programme recovery, and engineering business performance will be added regularly. If you have a specific question you would like addressed, get in touch.
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