TD-8:
Like I said before, I have worked for the local highway agency for 37 years this June. The one thing my formal education lacked was business courses. Even working for a govt agency, it is VERY useful to know your way around a balance sheet. If you want to be an engineer and have management responsibilities you need to understand the profit / loss, depreciation etc.
I ran our agency's Maintenance Division for 10 years. My division "rented" it's trucks and equipment from the Equipment Division. (Our Division had 90 single axle dumps and 6 - 5 axle straight truck flowboys, 2 hydraulic excavators, 2 scrapers, 3 dozers, 5 motorgraders, a paver, 2 rollers and all the associated support "stuff" and 125 employees. I told folks I ran a trucking / construction "company"
). If the Equipment Division "made" money on the internal rental rate, it drove my cost up. If they lost money, it was good for me but they didn't generate enough money to maintain and replace the equipment. I wanted to see the P&L statements on a regular basis to get rid of the unprofitable equipment (insufficient hours per year) and maximize the "profit" on the profitable equipment.
We get about 75 inches of snow a year. I needed all those single axle trucks w/ belly plow to cover our 2500 miles of roads in a timely manner. In the summer I could get by with 25-30 trucks. It really drives up the cost of operation when you have a dozen trucks with 350 - 450 hours per year of use and another dozen with 5-600 hours. The flowboys were great, we could drop 2 tags and add the underbelly. With salt weighing much less than bit or gravel, they were still legal weight wise in the winter
. We did experiment with contracting some of the plowing out to contractors but it's only somewhat successful.
The old manager used to insist we do summer work like patching and guard rail repair with the single axle dumps or a supervisor's pickup. His objective was to increase usage of the low hours trucks. It was a little more inconvenient for the employees to get in an out of a big dump, but utilization went up. New manager has allowed 1 tons for patching, rail work, misc stuff and the utilization of the big dumps is down. I told the Maintenance Division head, his "little trucks' are killing him cost wise. The hourly rate of his big dumps that he has to have is going up on every big dump plus he's paying the full cost of all the smaller trucks they've added to the fleet. There's an optimum balance to be achieved but one needs to watch that P&L regularly.
Sorry about running on, the short version, as an engineer, it's really beneficial to understand the business side of any organization.
PS: I ran a local for-profit tourist railroad as a hobby (all-volunteer). As President / General Manager for a few years, I got some real world experience keeping the doors open and the lights on
