Uso de indicadores no auxílio à tomada de decisão: estudo de caso da construção civil

Abstract

Business management has evolved a lot lately. In this sense, various concepts like assembly line, lean manufacturing and the just-in-time are being studied to also help with the Civil Engineering industry. This sector has undergone diverse transformations, and, even involving high investments and great variety of people and processes in their activities, the control of costs and deadlines is not yet well consolidated for this area. Therefore, to understand better which indicators are used to help the decision-making, its forms of analysis, decision-making and its respectiveimpacts is still a gap of knowledge. So, the present work sought, through case study, to understand how an incorporator/constructor in themarket of the state of Ceará has made decisionafter the use of indicators of costs and deadlines. For this, we studied the indicators of control and planning of work evaluated by the company, being present at the critical analysis meetings and interviewingthe managers to identify the form of conduction of these meetings, the most used indices and the way of decision-making, doing, afterwards, the general analysis of the four months of follow-up. In these meetings there were the work engineers (resident and planning), the director of engineering, the acquisitionssector’s professionalsand the planning consultants.Questions were made to ask managers who participated in the meeting, with exception of the acquisitionssector. With this, it was possible to better understand the processes, the indicators,the decision-making, the impacts of them, the improvements that could be implemented and the perception of each on the wholeprocess of critical analysis. It was noticed that, during the meetings:(a) many negative impacts verified by the indicators ocurred due to the absence/change of definitions of directives on the part of the directory, of the commercial sector, and of the clients, and not due to technical failures in the work planning; (b) some decisions based on indicators were not effective, howeverthe monitoring avoided worse situations and, even, irreversibleones (e.g., extrapolation of the delivery deadline of the work); (c) the result that, aparently, is positive may, in truth, indicate the bad planning of the use of the available resources (e.g., relation between the Performance Deadline Indice and the disbursement flow); (d) the work management understood the importance of its work and of the planning consulting work, so that there would be synergy between their work and that off the planning consulting.One concludes that the indicators studied were sufficient for monitoring the impacts in the course of the projects due to the decisions originating in the change of scenario of the company or non-planned decisions. The indicators werefundamental to keep the project close to the objectives of date of delivery and cost. One must enphasize the easiness during the planning and control process starting from the fact that the project skillfully accomplished its initial phase.