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The number of construction project managers initializing the use of the Last Planner System of Production Control (LPS), an operating system for project management designed to optimize work flow and promote rapid learning, is rapidly increasing, motivated by industry trends and testimonials of its perceived benefits. This study, limited to the building sector, is a systematic literature and testimonial search of the perceived motivations and benefits or challenges for choosing LPS. It substantiates the claims of those perceptions through a structured survey of senior and mid-level managers. Quantitative statistical tools infer that practitioners who use LPS experience more reliable planning, better supply chain integration, and less work flow time. However, managers who directly implement LPS are faced with external resistance from clients and subcontractors, and feel that their organization does not offer the necessary incentives for adopting LPS, indicating a possible clash of paradigms. The case studies and testimonials were available in the literature referenced in the paper, but the survey and the method for analysis are new and have not been published elsewhere, either wholly or in part.

Buildings alone consume approximately 40% of the annual global energy and contribute indirectly to the increasing concentration of atmospheric carbon. The total life cycle energy use of a building is composed of embodied and operating energy. Embodied energy includes all energy required to manufacture and transport building materials, and construct, maintain, and demolish a building. For a systemic energy and carbon assessment of buildings, it is critical to use a whole life cycle approach, which takes into account the embodied as well as operating energy. Whereas the calculation of a building's operating energy is straightforward, there is a lack of a complete embodied energy calculation method. Although an input−output-based (IO-based) hybrid method could provide a complete and consistent embodied energy calculation, there are unresolved issues, such as an overdependence on price data and exclusion of the energy of human labor and capital inputs. This paper proposes a method for calculating and integrating the energy of labor and capital input into an IO-based hybrid method. The results demonstrate that the IO-based hybrid method can provide relatively complete results. Also, to avoid errors, the total amount of human and capital energy should not be excluded from the calculation.