CREJ - Building Dialogue - March 2017
With over $3 billion approved for new school construction, and state population growth at an all-time high, the race to build new schools is faster than ever before. School districts, designers and builders are all working together to find solutions to speed up project delivery without sacrificing quality while staying within budget. To get students into new facilities, out of portables, and to reduce bussing, an integrated delivery process is critical. This approach provides an opportunity for the general contractor to play an active role in the design phase of a new school. By having representatives from the general contractor sitting at the drawing board, they can provide important input in key areas, including: Real-Time Pricing: As options are explored for things such as materials, equipment and labor, the general contractor can provide the design team with up-to-the-moment information regarding current costs and anticipated pricing trends. This information helps the architects and school districts to plan ahead and make sure that there won’t be unforeseen budget overruns. Availability of Materials: Considering the construction boom taking place across multiple sectors in our state, materials may or may not be readily available. For example, lead times on storefront windows continue to increase and therefore must be purchased and stored ahead of time, if they are going to be incorporated into a project in a timely way. Construction Trades and Labor: Not only is finding skilled trades people a challenge, but so is the ability to recruit and hire a dependable workforce. A general contractor who plays an active role in the design process can predict where manpower will be most needed during the construction process, and also know where pools of talent exist to provide necessary support at critical junctures. Constructability Review: As the design of a new school building takes form, the representatives from the general contractor can provide intermittent constructability reviews. These reviews provide everyone on the team with the opportunity to determine the best and fastest approaches to build different building sectors. By anticipating potential challenges ahead of time, the designers can correct potential flaws, and the GC and determine the most efficient scheduling and most effective approach. A recent school project that is implementing a fast-tracking, integrated delivery process is the Far Northeast Campus No. 28, located in Green Valley Ranch for the Denver Public Schools. As part of the integrated delivery process, two pull-planning sessions were held. IDP utilizes pull-planning sessions as a way to work from a target completion date (milestone) backward to define and sequence tasks so that their completion releases the next phase of work. As a result, workflow becomes more reliable and efficient as the waste of waiting, redundancy and over processing are eliminated. The first pull-planning session with the design team identified critical decision points in the design process where systems would need to be selected in order to meet submittal requirements or to facilitate early packages to authorities having jurisdiction. At the beginning of construction, a second pull-planning session was conducted with the design team and the contractor to coordinate mandatory deadlines for different construction phases. This helped the team to define a critical path to the completion of the building by better anticipating potential challenges and knowing how to overcome those challenges ahead of time. Based on the work of the team (which included the architect, GC and school district representatives), the Far Northeast Campus No. 28 will be completed within an 18-month schedule, representing a significant reduction in the time it would normally take to design and construct a new school building. When successfully accomplished, IDP enables students to begin a new school year in a brand new building, as opposed to the possibility of working in overcrowded, existing schools, portables, or being bussed out of their neighborhoods to other facilities. (Using Green Valley Ranch as an example, new schools will mean that Denver Public Schools will no longer have to bus more than 900 students out of the neighborhood to attend other city schools, saving the students time spent on a bus ride, while saving DPS additional costs for bus fuel and maintenance.)