Operations Management: An Integrated Approach, 5th Edition

REDUCING PROJECT COMPLETION TIME

You may need to reduce the time you spend finishing a particular project because of deadlines, promised completion dates, penalty clauses for late completion, or the need to put resources on a new project. When you plan a project, you make time estimates based on normal procedures and resources. However, you may be able to speed up a project by making additional resources available. For example, your company could have materials shipped via premium rather than normal transportation to get the materials faster and the activity finished sooner. You could authorize overtime to speed up an activity. Another possibility, as is done in highway construction, is to bring in lights so workers can work through the night and minimize traffic disruptions. Whatever the method, you can often reduce the time needed to finish an activity.

Crashing Projects

At the same time that you shorten a project's duration, you also need to minimize the additional expense. We call shortening a project crashing the project. To crash the project and minimize expense, you need additional information about your project activities. Let's use Michael and Elyssa's project with deterministic time estimates (shown in Figure 16-3). Table 16-10 shows the new crashing information.

Crashing

Reducing the completion time of the project.

TABLE 16-10 Normal and Crash Cost Estimates

In Table ...