Update Forecast

InEight Control includes functionality that supports multiple individual forecasts that can be shared and compared as needed. The changes from these forecasts can then be published to the company’s official Live Forecast.

Review System-Generated Forecast Values

While you will make forecast updates during forecast review at month’s end, you can use daily reporting to make course corrections throughout the month.

InEight Report includes the following reports you can run for daily project feedback:

• Quantity Claiming Details by Groups

• Daily Cost Performance

• Crew Performance

• Project Productivity

Below is an example from the Daily Cost Performance report:

These reports highlight red flag items that need your attention so you can make project adjustments as needed.

Update Forecasts

InEight Control includes features to support a typical workflow for reviewing and updating your monthly forecast:

Updating and Sharing Individual Forecasts

Manual Forecasting

When making individual forecast updates, you may find the need to make manual forecast changes.

Scenario 1: As you near completion on a cost item, you know some additional punch list work is needed, so you adjust the forecast to reflect those additional man-hours.

Scenario 2: A cost item has been running with a productivity factor of 1.6 and the forecast remaining productivity is set at .65. This clearly looks off, so you conservatively change the remaining productivity factor to 1.5.

Scenario 3: A highly paid employee leaves the job, and you hire a helper crew to do the remaining work and need to adjust the costs and man-hours accordingly.

InEight Control provides two ways to do manual forecasting:

Manual Forecasting (EAC)

You can make Estimate At Completion (EAC) forecasts by making manual changes to man-hours, productivity, and costs directly in the forecast-related fields on the CBS register.

Manual Forecasting (ETC)

You can forecast remaining work (Estimate to Completion – ETC) by adjusting your labor and equipment resources on a cost item. You can add or remove resources and adjust man and equipment hours which in turn will update your forecasted remaining hours and costs.

Forecast Review Meeting

Typically, the Project Manager/Project Controls Manager hold a monthly meeting to review everything that’s happened over the past month. It is recommended to establish a review schedule at the start of the project to ensure teams have time to review their individual forecasts prior to the meeting.

Below is a list of things you may cover in the Forecast Review meeting:

• Comparison to previous month. Review all cost items with significant changes in forecast value and add notes with reasoning.

• For direct work, comparison to straight-line forecast. Review all cost items that deviate notably from straight-line forecast (average performance). Understand what is changing in these operations to improve or worsen performance.

• Review Forecast remaining man-hours and costs to ensure there are no negative values. (This would indicate you have already busted a forecast.)

• Review high risk areas and areas for opportunity. For high-risk areas, identify mitigation plans. For areas of opportunity, document goal/target forecasts while remaining conservative with the Live Forecast.

During forecast review, you may find it helpful to have pre-defined saved views within the CBS workspace. This includes setting up a view that contains:

• An earned/actual values data block

• A forecast data block

It can also be helpful to use the Forecast Delta data block to highlight differences:

Submit Final Forecast

Although team members can save, analyze and share multiple personal and shared forecasts, only one forecast– the project Live Forecast represents the official project forecast that is used for company reporting. Typically, the project manager or project controls manager is responsible for ensuring the Live Forecast is final.

Once changes are agreed upon, the manager can update the live forecast accordingly.

If integrated with your ERP, the manager would also be responsible for syncing the live forecast through the InEight Control Actions menu.

Note: The last time the live forecast is synced during the designated freeze period is what InEight Control will store as that month’s forecast snapshot for future reference.

Access the following content to learn more about pushing individual forecast values to the live forecast:

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