A contractor in Bangalore won a Rs 4.8 crore school building project. Before execution began, the team prepared a project budget: one total number, broken into a rough split between civil work and finishing. No category breakdown. No line-item structure.…
A project manager in Hyderabad ordered 17 cubic metres of M20 concrete from the RMC plant for a beam and slab pour on the third floor. Four transit mixers arrived. All challans matched. The pour went smoothly. Two days later,…
A site engineer in Pune finished the third-floor slab pour. The store had issued 4.1 tones of TMT bar. The bar bending schedule required 3.6 tones. Nobody logged the 500-kilogram difference. Five weeks later, a purchase request went out for…
A project manager in Surat finished a Rs 2.6 crore residential project and ran a closeout audit. The numbers did not add up. Three and a half metric tonnes of TMT bar were unaccounted for across the project. No CCTV…
A mid-size civil contractor in Mumbai ran three concurrent projects without a single written vendor rate agreement on file. Every supplier relationship lived in the procurement manager’s phone and memory. When that manager left for a competitor in the middle…
A project manager on a Rs 4.2 crore commercial building in Chennai spent three days chasing a painting crew over a two-day slip. The painting activity had 11 days of float. Nobody on the team knew that. At the same…
A contractor in Hyderabad wraps up a Rs 2.8 crore commercial fit-out. Handover done, client satisfied, final RA bill cleared. But Rs 16 lakh in retention money that was deducted across 14 bills over 18 months never comes back. No…
A contractor managing three active projects reviews his week on a Thursday morning. Two confirmed client payments are expected within three weeks. A subcontractor bill for Rs 8.5 lakh fell due on Tuesday. Material procurement for the next phase needs…
Four weeks behind a construction project schedule is not a usual issue. It is the position most project managers find themselves in at some point on any project of meaningful duration. They try to figure out how the delay happens,…
There is never a single cause of loss in construction margins. There is no particular moment during execution where a project manager looks at the numbers of project budget and sees the problem clearly. The money spills out gradually in…