Earned value without the jargon: a practical guide for Indian contractors
CPI, SPI, EAC and VAC sound like consultant vocabulary. They are actually four simple questions about whether you are going to lose money on this package.
Four numbers, four questions
Planned value asks what you promised to have done by today. Earned value asks what you have actually done, priced at contract rates. Actual cost asks what it cost you to do it. Everything else — CPI, SPI, EAC, VAC — is arithmetic on those three.
Why physical progress must drive it
If earned value is computed from invoices or from a percentage someone typed in, the indices are decorative. It has to come from validated executed quantity — the DPR your site engineer signed and your planner cleared — otherwise CPI simply reflects your billing cycle.
The two leaks nobody prices
Idle manpower and hindrance days are real money and almost never appear in a monthly cost report. Fifteen workers idle for six hours because a crane did not arrive is a number you can compute and, more importantly, a number you can claim. Capture it the day it happens, not in a reconstruction a year later.
Reading the indices honestly
A CPI of 0.94 on a ₹180 crore package is not a rounding error; it is roughly ₹10 crore of margin at completion. The value of EVM is not the ratio, it is that the ratio moves months before your P&L does.
Plan-Sarthi puts these practices into one workspace — validated DPRs driving the S-curve, critical path, earned value and forecast automatically.
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