CREJ - Building Dialogue - September 2015
Efficiency is a growing theme across the construction industry. Companies are implementing new processes to eliminate waste, ensure project efficiency and guarantee on-time delivery – all with an eye to being more competitive and positioning for work in new markets. While every project is unique, most can benefit from LEAN practices throughout both preconstruction and construction. Following are a few examples of those practices. Last Planner® System How it benefits your project: by ensuring the entire project team is focused on meeting project milestones and not individual milestones. The Last Planner System benefits a project by ensuring the entire project team is focused on meeting project milestones rather than individual milestones. LPS typically is implemented by holding work planning sessions with the architect, general contractor, subcontractors and other stakeholders to collaboratively prepare plans for the upcoming week. Once a weekly work plan is finalized, the site supervisors then perform daily check-ins with the trades as they execute their work to verify scheduling commitments for the week are met. Since many construction trades are not familiar with this approach to work planning in construction, it is important to take time at the beginning of a project to train everyone on the system and the importance of accurate scheduling and the impact they have on other project team members. Overall, this process keeps project teams flexible, and allows them to quickly adapt to schedule conflicts and challenges. Because this process is focused on establishing team goals, not individual goals, it helps us ensure the entire project team is focused on meeting project milestones and not individual milestones. Pull Planning How it benefits your project: by utilizing sequence to plan work. The most successful plans come from collaborative teams that are highly engaged in a project from the outset, starting with design. The process of pull planning helps to identify the sequence of scheduling activities necessary to complete each phase of a project. A key process needed to achieve waste elimination, pull planning sessions should be applied throughout a project at the following levels: • Strategic – Mapping out the overall project delivery requirements and aligning all stakeholders with one clear objective. • Operational – Mapping out the processes and procedures of integrated and streamlined workflow for all project stakeholders. • Tactical – Daily detailed planning of sequence and scope of work to be performed. This multilevel approach is extremely successful at delivering projects on-time and budget. Elimination of Waste How it benefits your project: by allocating resources in the right place at the right time. A construction project is like a row of dominoes. If each part and piece is placed in the right order, then all the pieces work exactly like they should when put into motion. However, if one domino is set in the wrong location, it can interfere with the function of the entire system. In construction, workflows for developing project plans and sequences are as important as the physical work teams put in place. This makes it critical to ensure that teams are using their time and resources efficiently. Pull planning and location-based scheduling are helpful tools to examine where resources are required and compare them with detailed weekly work plans that outline what work is being performed. This allows a team to “eliminate waste” by rearranging the sequence of work so it is performed in the most efficient manner. This ensures all resources are in the right place at the right time, and that dependent activities happen in the correct order. Just-in-Time Delivery How it benefits your project: by thoughtfully managing construction materials on site. Constantly moving materials around a job site can potentially create an excess of waste and impact productivity. In an effort to mitigate this, it is helpful to identify a champion on each project to collaboratively work with trade partners to identify the most accessible and productive spot in a given area or phase to store materials so they don’t get in the way of ongoing construction. It is also important to take the time to review storage areas with construction trades both after deliveries and during actual construction. This partnering allows a project team to make smart and timely decisions to keep all parties productive and mitigate wasted efforts. By implementing LEAN practices on every project, contractors will better adapt to changing roles and responsibilities, and position themselves to offer solutions not just services. jpeterson@mccarthy.com