These roles a planning engineer should do while working a in construction industry

Role of planning engineer in the construction industry

Role of a Planning Engineer: A role of a Planning Engineer is to mainly support the Project Manager and Project team with information to execute the project in time and within the budget allocated. This information is used by Project Managers in taking decisions for a smooth execution of the project.

The role of planning engineer is to collect the information required by first detailing the activities involved in the project, fitting those in the timelines, calculating the materials, manpower and machinery required to execute these activities in the time frame decided.

Since there are always deviations in the plan, the planning engineer also has to take periodic updates and revise the schedules to meet the targets.

I know these things look like textbook definitions, So I will simply put the Roles & Responsibilities of the Planning Engineer in General for your better understanding.

1. Preparation of Project Schedule (Tools used: Primavera, MS Project etc.,) covering entire scope and within defined timelines
2. Calculating Optimal Material requirement, Manpower Requirement (of various trades) & Machinery Requirement
3. Plan for budget required for the project and create various budget heads to document and monitor the expenses
4. Create Cashflow analysis (ie., Expected billing (cash inflow) vs Expected cash outflow)
5. Co-ordinate with various departments like Engineering (who provides working drawings), Procurement (who buys materials), Contracts (who awards contracts & raise any issues with the client), quality (who maintains ) & Commissioning Departments
6. Collect periodic updates and prepare daily, weekly and monthly updates of the project
7. Create variance reports (Schedule Variance and Cost Variance – usually Earned Value Method (EMV) is used for this) at various stages of the project to analyse deviations
8. Create Project Closing Reports and Learnings

Also, these job roles are only applicable for large scale projects. In small projects, usually planning engineer does almost all the office work that includes and is not limited to Hiring Contractors, Issuing Work Orders, Bill Certifications, client coordination, client billing, These are the role of planning engineer in construction industry.