Project schedules, lead times and ROI are all words that can either make you cringe or jump with joy. The deciding factor is not what you are using, but who. While the average project timeline in this industry is 8 to 10 weeks, (don’t cringe yet!) here at Southeastern, we cut that time in half. These are the 5 rules to completing a design-build project from start to finish and the important things to remember along the way. Plus, how we can help you write schedules, plan projects, shrink time-lines, and increase ROI. Don’t you want to jump with joy, too?
1. Getting Quick Approval
It all starts with receiving plans from a customer and getting them to CAD. This involves asking the question: how soon can we take your plans and get everything approved? In order to schedule a roll out in a specific time frame, we first need to get the customers plans to our manufacturing team for approval and then returned for customer approval. Our typical turnaround timeframe for approval is between 48-72 hours.
2. Keeping Your Material Acquisition Healthy
Manufacturing lead times can really leave you waiting. When selecting a vendor, our first priority is the quality of the product. The second factor is the price and the third is the location. It’s a difficult balance to find vendors who fit into all three of those categories. Luckily, the best way to keep your raw materials pipeline flowing is to have longstanding vendor partnerships. At Southeastern, our acquisition for raw materials is closer to the speed of sound than to a cow crossing the road, and fast manufacture lead times leads to shrinking your timeline and saving you money.
3. Crosstraining to Cut Your Lead Time
Here at Southeastern we try to make the impossible possible. Since the retail design industry isn’t static, everyone knows that the quickest way to get your new design on the floor depends on the manufacturing process. The breadth of the store and involvement in the design process contributes to figuring out how long of a lead-time is needed. When production requires, we turn to a method we believe makes our production capacity reach beyond the norm. Southeastern employees have multiple skill sets, not only helping to keep operations running in shifts that can help produce faster without sacrificing the quality of the product which makes timelines shorter. Having multiple skill sets in the company also make them an asset to you, your end product, and our company while giving our employees a greater self worth.
4. Shrink Your Timeline
The extra time it takes to complete a project is lost money, but shrinking timelines without sacrificing the quality of the work saves everyone money. The typical time between introducing concepts and manufacturing is 8-10 weeks in this industry. We think that is too long. With fast approval, crosstraining and having experts running the production and rollouts, we cut the average timeline in half. While our competitors are spending 2 weeks on CAD, 2 weeks on material acquisition, and 6 weeks on manufacturing, we are doing those steps in half the time. Our single store production time is typically 4-6 weeks, but we do mass rollouts, too. Our team completed 68 store remodels concurrently for Food Lion, including décor and woodwork, in 3-4 months due to our quick approval turnaround, vendor partnerships and aggressive lead time.
5. Write a Schedule with Flexibility
The installation process involves meticulous planning and attention to detail. Our project managers oversee the details so that you, our valued customers don’t have to. In order to make the installation process as flawless as possible, our project managers write schedules based off of construction dates. By making an exhaustive to-do list from A to Z, we make sure to stay on time while working with the general contractors, too. But we also realize that historically every good plan has a hiccup or two, so it is extremely importance to allow room for flexibility in your schedule. By building room to adjust into the schedule, we can keep the project in our customer’s timeline even if the general contractor is late.
You don’t need to cringe at the sight of project schedules and lead times anymore. Increasing your ROI is easy with these 5 important rules to remember when completing a project, and we can help bring you the success your projects deserve.
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