Labor Estimation and Trending in an Operations Environment

Accurate cost estimation for future work is important for ensuring that organizations have the personnel and resources needed to complete a task successfully. Operations support in particular provides additional challenges for estimating cost. Unlike manufacturing-based work, it may be difficult to derive a "cost per product," and projects that appear to be similar may have drastically different underlying assumptions. In addition, for critical operations, a certain level of adaptability to changing circumstances is expected. Responding to contingencies or anomalies requires additional support and troubleshooting, and could result in increases to project cost. Labor estimation is one of the most important inputs for estimating the cost of an operations-based project, especially in a pre-established facility. Various methods are needed to develop reliable estimates. These methods include a bottom-up summarization of known or expected work items, and a top-down estimate generated by trending and scaling actual labor from past analogous operations support.