Increasing the Productivity of a Construction Project Using Collaborative Pull Planning

Abstract

With the growing competitiveness of the market and owners' increasing expectations, improving productivity has become all the more important. Construction professionals have recognized the importance of increasing the reliability of the planning processes in order to realize the ultimate goal of increasing the productivity of construction projects. A relatively new planning approach known as collaborative pull planning coupled with Last Planner System® has proven to be successful in improving the reliability of the planning processes and increasing the productivity. This paper presents a case study of an ongoing project where the prime contractor has adopted the collaborative pull planning process. The details of the planning and control processes have been captured based on observations and interviews with the stakeholders. While measuring the actual improvement in productivity was not feasible, the percent plan complete provided empirical evidence of increasing reliability and completion of planned tasks. Other emergent experiences of the stakeholders included shared understanding of the project goals, improved trust, and better communication.

Pull planning versus push planning: Investigating impacts on crew performance from a location-based perspective

“…On the other hand, the pull approach ensures selective drawing of resources to be accessed by activities whose output is needed further downstream in the process (Tommelein 1998). This approach also aims to improve productivity by reducing inventories that can negatively impact the smooth workflow of a project (Ghosh et al, 2017).…”

Investigating conflicts of expert contractors using the last planner system in building information modeling process

“…According to the reports by Ghosh et al (2017), LPS and pull planning have contributed to increase the efficiency of building construction. In their study, instead of employing the Gantt chart, general contractors prepared a detailed virtual schedule and gave it to each of sub-contractors as a "sticky note".…”

“…By doing so, the general contractor realizes constraints between sub-contractors in their paths. Eventually, the sub-contractors will notice their conflict before coming to the concurrent point (Ghosh et al, 2017). If sub-contractors be noticed to have such a conflict, some of them change or switch their working positions, agreed with the supervisor, to avoid conflicts (Alves et al, 2016).…”

“…The operations of construction projects have been criticized because of low productivity, cost overruns and significant project delays, during these years (Erol et al, 2016;Onyango, 2016). Efforts have been made to increase cooperation in the construction project, but this cooperation is challenging because of the division the project into small sectors, stakeholders' relations and the temporality of the projects (Parchami Jalal et al, 2019;Ghosh et al, 2017). The use of lean construction contributes to reducing the project duration and the possible changes in the construction project by eliminating communication barriers (Erol et al, 2016).…”

Investigating the Use of VR Visualization to Help Students Gaining Understanding on Pull Planning

“…An observational study was conducted comparing pull planning practice to common planning practice, specifically Critical Path Method (CPM) planning (Ghosh, Reyes, Perrenoud, & Coetzee, 2017). The study involved general contractors who adopted visual schedules as an alternative to the traditional Bar Chart typically utilized in CPM planning.…”