Perform Engineering Case Study: Boosting Project Efficiency & Reducing Labor Costs with Worktivity

Perform Engineering delivers construction and engineering projects with a team divided between an office and multiple project sites. They use Worktivity to keep office-based project labour attached to the right job.

The problem they started with

Engineering firms track site labour carefully, because it is contracted and visible. Office labour is where the accounting gets loose. Design revisions, coordination, procurement support and client correspondence all consume real engineering hours, and those hours are usually allocated to a project by estimate at the end of the month.

On a thin-margin project, that estimate is the difference between knowing your position and assuming it.

What they use

• Time by project and task, so office hours attach to a specific job rather than to overhead

• Cost views, to see accumulated labour cost per project during delivery

• Team views, so engineers supporting several jobs at once are visible as such

What changed

Monthly project reviews moved from reconstruction to reading. The share of engineering time going to each job became a number rather than a negotiation, which also made it easier to see when one project was quietly consuming the capacity of another.

Why this pattern fits engineering firms

Site labour is measured because it has to be. Office labour is just as real and usually is not. That asymmetry is where project margin goes missing.

What Worktivity records

Worktivity records time, activity level, the application in the foreground and the site host, and only while a shift is running. It does not record typed text, window titles or full web addresses, and it never requests the camera or microphone. This is a tool for computer-based work, not a site attendance system. The full list is here.