FARR Best Practices Article – Jobsite Inefficiencies – Your Biggest Losses of Time & Money
FARR Best Practices is an educational program that is the brainchild of Chris Ford and Tim Ford, part of Western Colloid’s technical team, and it is designed to improve efficiency, promote jobsite safety and cleanliness, but most of all it teaches contractors how to create a winning team of roof technicians.
Below is a transcript of a very important conversation between our technical support team, Chris Ford and Tim Ford, on a podcast of the same name.
Chris:
As representatives for the technical division of Western Colloid we do the best we can to aid contractors and be available for questions. We focus heavily on the efficiency. We understand it’s a difficult job. We understand the conditions aren’t always ideal, and so we want to make it as easy as possible. We are approaching this subject from the labor end and we have a real understanding what goes on. We have a soft spot in our hearts for the crews out there who are actually putting a roof on.
THE RIGHT FOREMAN IS CRITICAL
Chris: What would you say is one of the biggest losses of time, waste of labor, inefficiencies that you see on a regular basis?
Tim:
First, not having the right guy be the foreman on the crew. So much time is wasted because guys don’t have the leadership they need. They need to be shown the direction of being ready to go, be it that day or the next day, what is expected of them, and what their roles are. Somebody must be in charge up there and set the pace. I often see guys wander around, just kind of do things on their own.
DELAYS IN THE MORNING
Chris:
My number one issue is not being ready in the morning. In my time on the roof, we all had our roles, and after a while they weren’t even necessarily spoken. We had a pump guy. The same guy who set the pump up in the morning was generally the same guy that tore it down at night, and he’ll set it up again in the morning. He checks the throat seal; he checks to make sure everything’s there. Getting it set up, hooked up to the tank, or the tote or whatever we’re pulling from.
And then somebody else is a ladder guy. Somebody pulls the ladder off the truck, he leans it up against the building, he extends it, climbs it, you know, ties it off at the top. As you’re progressing through the morning, someone else is opening rolls. Everyone kind of knows what their job is and goes right to it on their own.
Our productive months are, are basically May through September. The reason they’re productive is because it’s light and its summer. With that comes a lot of heat. It drives me crazy when I meet somebody at 6:30am in the morning to get started for the day, and we don’t start working until nine.
Tim:
That’s something that I’m kind of blown away by. 6:30am is kind of early for some of these guys, but back when I was roofing, we showed up at the job at O-dark 30. We had the headlights on to hook up the pumps and set stuff up. We wanted to get in there and then get out to try and beat a little bit of that heat. And then in here in Southern California, it was twofold. We wanted to beat a little bit of that traffic. Ready to start early!
Chris:
The idea is not show up to the job after the sun’s up. The idea is start putting on a roof when the sun comes up. You can set up the pump with the headlights. You know a lot of the preliminary, finishing your coffee, getting your boots on, finding your gloves and things like that can all be done prior to sunrise. Not to mention you are wasting the best part of the day.
You know, you’re most productive when your coffee is fresh, when it’s just hitting your bloodstream. That’s, that’s the time when guys first show up to the job. That’s when you’re going to your 150 squares put on before break. As soon as you eat and it’s 103 degrees outside, production falls off a cliff. So, it just kills me when crews aren’t ready to work guys aren’t ready.
Tim:
It’s that leadership role. Somebody setting what the job tasks are, what’s expected, what’s your role is. It’s critical. It goes back to the thing you have control over, it’s labor. Cost of products are cost of products. You don’t have any control over that. You have control over labor. So, getting the most out of your crew is what makes or breaks your profit. It’s hard to find good guys, they’re in high demand, but you can help. By pushing that idea of production and efficiency, by putting an emphasis on what you can improve, if you are making it a priority.
Chris:
Western Colloid is here to help you, and we want to see you succeed. The whole idea is we’re going to help you train some guys. And then those guys, you work some new guys in with a couple of them, and they train the next guys,
IT’S A FOUR MAN JOB
Tim:
I preach it all the time; this is a team effort. You must work together as a team.
I consider four jobs on a crew. There’s a Sprayer, a Roller (person in charge of setting the polyester fabric in place), a Broomer (person in charge of securing the polyester fabric with a broom), and a Hose puller (person helping maneuver the hose for the sprayer plus other tasks) . They do other things, but those are the four basic jobs. And that roller, he either makes it or breaks it, because if he’s not rolling straight, then brooming is a nightmare. That is why the broomer must work with the roller and guiding him as he’s brooming,
Chris:
If he has the sheet too loose, he needs to give it a couple pulls, a couple snaps and just tighten it up. Because if it’s too loose, you’re going to leave Air pockets and voids. It’s just that the teamwork of working together, it’s like a dance. And if you watch and experienced crew just move across the roof, they, they make it look effortless. But again, it comes to experience and practice and doing it a few times before you really fall into that rhythm.
Tim:
That’s another thought that strikes me, either a contractor has too few or too many guys. We believe in a four-man crew. I see it all the time where too few it’s really brutal. You are just destroying your crew by overworking them. They’re just not going to be productive. They’re just going to start being sloppy which is going to kill you on the back end. In this case the contractor right from start is setting them up for failure if he sends three guys to the job.
In the case of too many guys, by sending seven guys to the job, for example, I don’t have something for all these guys to do. You know, I can add another roller, I can add another broomer, but I can only spray so fast. Having the right amount of labor for the job falls under the responsibility on either a project manager, superintendent, or if you’re a smaller company, maybe the owner himself or herself. It’s all about being productive and getting the most labor you can out of the correct number of people.
PREP WORK
Chris:
Here is another example of being inefficient. So often it could be from the contractor, it could be from the building owner, but everyone is in such a rush to start putting a roof on. This type of roof installation is, in a lot of ways, like painting. You might do 10 hours of prep work and then, and then you paint it in an hour.
Tim:
The guys want to pick off the low hanging fruit right away, and they go to the open area, and they just want to start. Which is fine if you’re learning. And a lot of times in training I will choose that. Once you’ve got the system down put the roof on in the right order. How often have you seen a roof get cleaned with a blower four times because they, they didn’t clean the whole roof? They cleaned a quarter of it and then the wind blew all the dirt back. Or the drains or scuppers will have a bunch of Mastic built up around them. You’ve cleaned the roof, you’ve either pressure washed it, or you use brooms and blowers. You have got the roof clean, and you start spraying and now you must go back and tear out the drains. You end up making a big mess on an already cleaned roof.
Chris:
That’s the things that we would love to work with you on, showing you how we want the roof to be prepped and then what the procedure is to install the system. And it’s not installing the roof in the field. That’s not how we start a job. Crews look at us kind of funny when we start doing parapet walls first but there’s a reason for it. But we do all of our walls and curbs first with emulsion systems. And that’s something that’s kind of hard to describe to a guy, but they get it once they see how emulsion is put on why we do walls and curbs first. It’s the most efficient way, I always want to do the hard stuff first.
We talked about maximizing your mornings to get 70% of your maybe 80% of your work done. I want to start with, some of the tough stuff out of the way when it’s 72 degrees. If I have to get underneath AC units and be crawling on my hands and knees, I don’t want to do it when it’s 104 degrees and everything’s sticky and the metal is 180 degrees.
MISSING EQUIPMENT
Tim:
Here is another way to lose money on the job when the guys don’t have the right equipment or the right tools. When you have contacted Western colloid and go to the job to help your crew, I would say minimum of 75% of the time, the first thing I do after I show up to meet your guys is run to Home Depot to buy brooms, flashing brushes, or scissors.
Chris:
The guys aren’t properly equipped. That extends to the boots and the gloves.
Tim:
Especially the brooms, guys not taking care of them, letting them dry out. The crew needs to be trained to take care of the tools and supplies.
Chris:
So often I see not having enough pairs of scissors or having a spare broom. It falls into what we talked about earlier. If someone has to run to Home Depot to buy a broom now four guys are standing around because we didn’t buy a $16 piece of equipment.
Tim:
For installing a Western Colloid system, you have a pump and a hose, etc. but your tools up on the roof are really limited. It’s a broom, some brushes for flashing details, some scissors.
Chris:
For example, a job is $50,000. The stuff that that you need in terms of like out-of-pocket expense to be prepared is a few hundred dollars. Get some rubber boots for your guys, service the pump, make sure you have spare cam locks, and caps and plugs for your hydraulic hoses, and things like that. And then buy three or four brooms, buy three or four flashing brushes, multiple pairs of scissors. Equip the guys with the things that you know, that they’re going to blow through. We can reuse them to some degree but think of them as being disposable.
Tim:
Bottom line. I guess what we’re saying is come in with a plan.
Chris:
Reach out to us to help you understand what that plan should be. Make sure that the crew understands that they’re going to be working with a messy product and that they should have a change of clothes. They’re going to have a set of clothes that they wear up on the roof to do emulsion and when they get done, they’re going to change into some clothes before they get into their vehicle or a company vehicle.
Tim:
Final thoughts about being ready when you’re going to start a job and this kind of falls on the responsibility of the contractor or project manager. Make sure the pump is working. If you haven’t used it in six months, maybe it’s worth firing up in the warehouse. Let’s make sure everything is in good working order. I recommend getting your pump serviced. You know, a lot of times we go through a busy season and when you go from job to job to job. When wintertime comes, it’s a good idea to take them in and get them serviced. It will keep the pump ready to go for the next time when you pull it out.
