The April meeting proved to be a productive one with many cost saving opportunities presented and explored by members. In fact, one of the proposals could yield cost savings and provide critical training for members in MOU 8 and 17.
Cost Savings
One very promising idea generated by JIMEE committee members is for the inclusion of a City Employee Participation Level in the pre-proposal phase. The City Employee Participation Level would require, when feasible, for a request for proposal (RFP) requesting engineering services to contain a level of participation on technical tasks to be done by City employees.
Two other cost savings initiatives were presented by members of the JIMEE committee and revolved around making design information survey and boring logs more accessible to project managers and engineers and creating procedures to reflect the use of this information. For example, boring information is collected throughout the city but all logs may not be reported to a centralized location. Also, currently designers may not access previous soil engineering information before requesting additional geotechnical services. If these logs were centralized designers would have all this information to consult before incurring additional costs.
These cost savings measures would not have been presented without the input of the membership. Member participation is crucial in our effort to find efficiencies and to achieve greater savings as we enter our next contract negotiations.
Click here to read an article from the American Public Works Association on how to find avenues for optimizing and gaining cost savings in the workplace.
Please feel free to send me an email with your ideas and concerns.
–Reported by Michael SimpsonSenior Environmental Engineer
Department of Public Works, Bureau of Sanitation
Efficiency at work…….