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Scheduling

Scheduling owner-supplied equipment and the owner's other contractors

By Review.LivePublished 3 min readHow we write

At the August site meeting, the ski hill's operations manager says the kitchen equipment the owner has bought "should be here in October" and that the hill's own audio-visual installers will "come in at the end". Neither is in your schedule. On this job, the final fire inspection waits for the kitchen hood and its suppression system.

Round air diffusers and recessed lights sit within a curved ceiling.
Photo: Suhail sartaj ahmed shaikh on Wikimedia Commons · Bulkhead · CC0 1.0 · Cropped, resized, colour adjusted and sharpened.

Put every item the owner buys and every contractor it hires into your schedule as activities, each with the date your work needs it, and check those dates weekly, as you do your own orders. Both can stop you: a late owner item holds up the work that depends on it, and an owner's crew that turns up unplanned takes rooms your trades need. Iowa State University's design manual, for one, requires the contractor to help set delivery dates for owner-furnished equipment and to show them in its construction schedule.

  1. At kickoff, list everything the owner is buying or hiring: owner-furnished equipment in the drawings and specifications, and separate contracts such as furniture, IT, security and moving.
  2. Agree who buys, receives, stores, installs and connects each item. The Iowa manual sorts them three ways: owner-furnished and then contractor-installed, contractor-connected or owner-installed.
  3. Take each need date from the work it feeds, such as a rough-in or an inspection, not the opening date; work back as for your own long-lead items.
  4. Show the owner's contractors as activities with logic: what each needs from you, how long it stays and what it hands back.
  5. Check every date weekly against a confirmed ship date or start. The day one slips, write to the owner: the new date, the work it holds up and the decision needed.
  6. Inspect each delivery jointly with the owner before you sign for it, as the Iowa manual requires, and record its condition.

Common mistakes

  • Leaving owner items off the schedule as "not in contract".
  • Taking the owner's opening date as the need date.
  • Accepting "October" as a date.

Action list

This week

  1. Ask the owner what it is buying and hiring
  2. Write down who installs and connects each item
  3. Set need dates from the work each item feeds
  4. Add the owner's contractors as activities
  5. Get a confirmed ship date for every owner item

Check your understanding

The owner says its IT contractor will "fit in around you". Why schedule that contractor anyway?

Show the answer
Fitting in around you still needs finished, clean, powered rooms, often just when your finishing trades want them. Scheduled with logic, the IT work shows which rooms must be ready and when, and a slip shows in the update, not at the door.

Sources

  1. Facilities Design Manual, Part 2 Support Documents: Div 01 Owner Furnished EquipmentIowa State University, Facilities Planning and Management · Iowa State University, United States (one public owner's specification template) · accessed
  2. FAR 52.245-1 Government Property, paragraph (d) Government-furnished propertyU.S. General Services Administration (Acquisition.gov) · United States federal government contracts · accessed
  3. FAR 52.236-8 Other ContractsU.S. General Services Administration (Acquisition.gov) · United States federal government construction contracts · accessed

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