Optimized Cash-flow: Opportunities for Finance Solutions for Contractors and Owners

While scheduling is being used by the construction planning teams to integrate the management of project time and cost, project financing is yet managed separately at the corporate level by the finance teams. This results in project finance being managed separately from project time and cost. This trend signifies a remarkable gap within the framework of project management. As a direct consequence of this trend, schedulers generate construction cash-flow forecasts for projects which are presented to the finance teams as a by-product of the scheduling process. This represents a huge imperfection of the generated cash flow as a management tool to help finance teams make prudent project finance decisions.

This paper presents a scheduling and cash flow generation case studies that achieves full integration between project duration, cost, and finance. In addition to the generation of project cash flow forecasts, the case studies show that the full integration between schedules and cash flow allows both teams to optimize schedules and generates cash flow that offer intriguing finance solutions.