BENCHMARKING PROJECT LEVEL ENGINEERING PRODUCTIVITY

The benchmarking of engineering productivity can assist in the identification of inefficiencies and thus can be critical to cost control. Recognizing the importance of engineering productivity measurement, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) developed the Engineering Productivity Metric System (EPMS) composed of a series of hierarchical metrics with standard definitions suitable for measuring engineering productivity at various levels. While the EPMS can be used to assess engineering productivity at multiple levels within a discipline, it cannot produce an overall project level productivity measurement due to the underlying method of defining productivity. Previous studies have attempted to develop other metrics to assess engineering productivity at the project level; however, these methods did not create metrics suitable for benchmarking. To overcome these limitations, this study developed a standardization approach using z-scores to aggregate engineering productivity measurement from actual data collected from 112 projects provided by CII member companies. This method produces a metric with a project level view of engineering productivity. It allows owners and engineering firms to summarize engineering productivity at both the discipline level and at the project level. The method illustrates a comprehensive and innovative procedure to develop a metric for summary of productivity metrics with different underlying outputs, thus laying the foundation for future analyses and studies.