Construction Engineering Firm Identifies $6.9M in Cost Savings through Employee Hour Redistribution

This company provides Water System and Environmental Remediation services for clients (both private and government) where they design and implement a wide range of solutions.

$6.9M

indirect cost savings identified

75%

increase in time spent on revenue generating work

Challenge

The client had enjoyed consistent growth for most of its existence through expansion in the client base, geography, and company acquisitions. The rapid growth of the company led to communication issues throughout the company and an inequitable distribution of company resources. This meant that consultants were spending less time on revenue-generating projects and several costly administrative positions were created without an accompanying increase in overall productivity.

Discovery

The team worked closely with the client to determine their desired employee time distribution and what was preventing them from succeeding in actualizing their goals. After listening to the employees in 1-on-1 interviews, TPG worked with a working committee to develop a company-wide survey encapsulating all areas that needed to be addressed. The results of this survey led to our team identifying several opportunities:

Defining the Roles & Responsibilities of the employees and the people ultimately responsible in each SBU
Improving Training by standardizing and re-introducing legacy training programs
Increasing Employee Visibility for Management by implementing a dynamic view of employee time

To capitalize on these opportunities, our team got organizational alignment from each key decision-maker in time for proper budgeting and implementation of the proposed initiatives.

Value Created

This client enjoyed immediate time savings derived from this 8-week initiative such as:

Company-wide alignment on the indirect time each employee should have at each level as to increase the time spent on client projects by 4.5%
Leveraging past initiatives and defining new company-wide strategic initiatives to uncover $6.9M dollars in potential cost savings in the next 18 months of operation
Improving the visibility managers had on their employees from their skillset, their responsibilities, the areas they were interested in developing, and their current project staffing.