Productivity: working smarter not harder

Productivity is one of the most significant components of successful project delivery and is fundamental to National competitiveness. Achieving expected or improved levels of productivity in our industry sectors relies upon the strength and availability of skilled and motivated labour, word class processes and techniques, supply chain efficiency, innovation, and the sharing of best practice. Our challenge is to understand the factors that are impacting productivity and to find solutions that result in sustainable improvement.

But what is productivity, and why is it so important?

Productivity is the measure of the effectiveness of productive effort of a labour and capital, and is measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. At a National level productivity is a key metric for Governments to assess trends in employment rates, salary levels and economic GDP output. At the level of projects delivery, productivity metrics identify the utilisation and efficiency of value-generating resources; where low productivity here could imply an inefficient deployment of workers and/or an over-resourced project.

This full-day workshop will offer an insight into how organisations from across Government, businesses, infrastructure clients and their supply chains are performing on productivity and how they plan to improve resource productivity across major projects. This will include hearing about how leading organisations have successfully improved their project productivity by utilising smarter resource planning techniques and harnessing technology.

This event will also be bringing together speakers from different angles on the productivity debate, including a look at the macro economic factors, a client’s view on stimulating greater productivity in projects and a view of how supply chains are meeting these challenges.

The key topics that will be discussed are as follows:
• Macro-economic productivity factors, and a look at how Government plan to tackle the UK’s poor productivity metrics
• Planning early to achieve the same outcomes by working smarter not harder
• Real-life examples to understand the barriers to productivity improvement
• A structured debate around how technology can be harnessed to enable improved productivity
• Case studies of productivity improvement from Jaguar Land Rover
• An international perspective of overcoming project productivity challenges