- Situation
- Mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) cost at a large residential developer is managed at package level, with HVAC, electrical, fire and plumbing as lump sums.
- Complication
- At that resolution a saving is a disputed total. Nobody can approve it, because nobody can see what it is made of.
- Question
- How do you turn a cost argument into a decision someone can sign?
- Answer
- Decompose the cost base until every saving is a line item. A 553-component master, Pareto-sorted and benchmarked against peers, produced a proposal of which ₹178 crore out of ₹183 crore was approved.
What we did
Decomposed the cost base. We drafted a 553-component cost master across eleven disciplines from NBC and IS codes. A Pareto pass showed that 15% of components drove 80% of spend, so negotiation effort went there. The 294 low-complexity items were tiered for policy-led optimisation instead of being argued one at a time.
15% of components carry 80% of MEP spend, so that is where negotiation effort went
The 294 low-complexity items were tiered for policy-led optimisation rather than negotiated one at a time.
Hover, tap or tab to a bar for its value.
Source: Godrej Properties MEP cost master, 2026 — 553 components across 11 disciplines
Changed how procurement is bought. Procurement ran project by project. Aggregating demand across a three-year pipeline projected a 5% saving on ₹300 crore of project cost. We built vendor-evaluation and IS-compliance frameworks for the 13 brand-critical items, about 14% of project cost, and they are now operationalised across 9 live vendor tenders.
Benchmarked against peers. We compared MEP costs across 22 projects, Godrej Properties and 12 competitors, in 5 cities, matched by segment. That surfaced 10 places where costs sat out of line with peers and fed a segment-wise provisioning policy. A separate like-for-like normalisation of 12 project files flagged 8 outliers for leadership review.
The result
₹178 crore of the ₹183 crore proposal was approved. The conversation had moved from totals to specific line items, which is what made approval possible.
97% of the savings proposal was approved
Hover, tap or tab to a bar for its value.
Source: Godrej Properties, 2026 — approved savings against the proposal
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