AXA XL's Construction insurance business rolls out Contractor Schedule Benchmarking service in North America

NEW YORK, Sept. 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AXA XL's Construction insurance team has rolled out a new schedule benchmarking service to strengthen their Subcontractor Default Insurance (SDI) clients' risk management efforts.    

According to Gary Kaplan, President of AXA XL's North America Construction business, "The global pandemic has shined a light on the importance of strong project controls to effectively manage risk.  Now is a time when every contractor is very aware of the importance of keeping the pulse on productivity, supply chain risks, and staying ahead of potential impacts to projects.  With this new service, we are helping our clients take stock of their scheduling practices and pinpoint where they might improve to drive project success – and subcontractor performance risk is at the heart of this."

Jim Richert, AXA XL's SDI Profit Center Leader adds "The construction industry has a wide range of scheduling practices – and notable inconsistency project to project.  Our RE team has had great results using the benchmarking approach across a number of key processes – such as prequalification, sub selection, and quality management - in order to provide our Partners with insight of how their practices stack up against their peers.  It only made sense that we apply this concept to schedule management controls.  We see time and time again that early recognition of challenges creates opportunity to mitigate impact.  At its foundation, strong schedule management drives opportunity to stay ahead of problems in a manner that helps to reduce risk for EVERYONE involved."

As part of the benchmarking service, AXA XL's SDI Construction risk engineering team reviews three general categories:

• Schedule Process & Procedures: The overall framework of the contractor's scheduling processes, procedures, and resources.
• Schedule Development: The contractor's practices for developing and approving the primary schedules that commit to the overall project duration – the bid/proposal schedule and the baseline contract schedule.
• Schedule Updates/Ongoing Management: The contractor's practices for performing regular project schedule updates and using these schedule tools to drive both project and enterprise success.   

Overall, the process is designed to be collaborative throughout the assessment of approximately forty schedule performance indicators.  The deliverable includes both summary and detailed report, along with anonymized comparison to other similar contractors.  Following debrief and alignment on the report, an actionable plan is tailored to the contractor's needs. 

As part of this assessment, AXA XL also enlists tech partner Smart PM Technologies to support analysis of schedules from three projects and identify objective recommendations for focused project controls.  This also creates an opportunity for the contractor to observe the value of SmartPM's analytics in real time.

"Sound practices in construction scheduling are imperative to achieving optimal project success," said Michael Pink, CEO of SmartPM Technologies. "Although this is generally known, the construction industry continually fails to implement it. It's critical to understand what makes for a truly 'good' or 'usable' schedule, and to have visibility into schedule data produced through advanced analytics. Empowering companies to do these things, alone, will have a positive impact within construction companies and, eventually, improve project controls for the overall industry."

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SOURCE AXA XL

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