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Sarbanes-Oxley and Cost Engineering - In the rush to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), many corporate accounting and compliance organizations have had little time to involve company cost engineers. The purpose of this article is to discuss many of the significant and critical impacts the act has on the world of engineering, architecture, and construction. This article is reprinted from the 2005 AACE International Transactions where it is listed as PM.16.
Scheduled Overtime and Loss of Productivity; Fact or Fiction? A Business Roundtable Report - One of the frequently-cited and relied upon documents in construction litigation is the 1980 Business Roundtable Report (BRT), entitled, "Scheduled Overtime Effects On Construction Projects." The BRT Report's continuity is based on the deep chasm that often exists between case arguments and case facts. In cases where direct documentary evidence is not available or of insufficient quality to discretely quantify or analyze labor productivity, consultants and experts look to published studies and industry publications, like the BRT's to aid in their analyses of labor efficiency and to aid in forming their opinions. This process is, in itself, a methodological hurdle, characterized by evaluating all methods and studies available to the expert-consultant and applying them. However, little attention has been paid to evaluating the studies themselves.
Managing Resource Leveling - While "automatic resource-leveling" functions offered by scheduling software applications were intended to incorporate resource requirements into the scheduling process, the software's inability to calculate accurate total float values when leveling has precluded their use for specified contractual requirements. As a result, contractors have used a manual method of adding "preferential logic" as a means of reflecting resource constraints while calculating accurate total float values. Instead of solving the resource problem, however, the result is often inaccurate schedules produced by already overtaxed project engineers who don't have the time to revise preferential logic to correct the "out-of-sequence progress" that inevitably results. This article will review the concept and benefits of automatic resource-leveling, and will examine a recent software application developed by one of the authors that has managed to bridge the gap between automatic resource-leveling and manual preferential logic. Also considered are the documentation requirements necessary to allow the owner to understand and believe the resource leveling output. This material was presented at the 2005 AACE International Annual Meeting but was inadvertently left off of the 2005 AACE International Transactions CD-ROM.