Role of a Digital Last Planner® System to Ensuring Safe and Productive Workforce and Workflow in Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

To cope with the dynamics of production, construction managers spend a significant amount of time organising the workforce, managing logistics and controlling the flow. Underestimating the process of workforce allocation and management could lead to serious productivity, safety, logistics, and coordination problems. To exacerbate this situation, the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic has created a situation where unorganised workforce allocation and tracking could increase the health and safety risk for the project. The Last Planner® System (LPS) advocates and incorporates processes to sustain flow suggested in Lean Production theory. Hence, the complex job of creating the workforce-flow can potentially be simplified through the LPS proactive planning during lookahead discussions. The paper captures a case study where the same safety and productivity issues were heavily encountered in a project involving multiple trades (15+) and having hundreds of workers struggling in the pandemic situation. Implementing design Science approach, the team has discovered a digital workflow management system that exhibits significant improvement in coordination, control over productivity wastage and safe working environment.This research utilised a digital LPS powered by real-time cloud-based system, capable of actively tracking the agreed workforce boosting productivity whilst keeping the workforce safe and secure.

Impact of Lean Practices in the Planning of Design Tasks: Evidence From Two Projects in France

“…As a result, digital tools are more needed to connect different parties and stakeholders to achieve proper planning. The use of these tools while implementing lean construction can mitigate the impact of fragmentation, disseminate the lean culture, integrate different partners in the project, and decrease workload related to sticky notes management during the implementation of LPS (Hua & Schwartz, 2021;McHugh et al, 2021;Pedó et al, 2020;Salhab et al, 2021). Nevertheless, digitizing lean construction is still in its infancy and its acceptance of it still needs further investigation.…”

Analysis of Lean Construction Cases in Ireland

“…A broad range of LC tools have been researched by academics (Noorzai, 2022;Schia et al, 2019;Zhang & Chen, 2016). In Ireland, LC case study research is limited to a few academic papers by Taggart et al (2019), Power and Taylor (2019), McHugh et al (2019), McHugh et al (2021a) and McHugh et al (2021b. This paper has further developed and consolidated case study literature in Ireland and has highlighted associated tools, benefits, and themes from 17 cases in 2022.…”

“…Existing literature relates to the Line of Balance production planning (Taggart et al,2019), The Last Planner System (Power & Taylor, 2019) and the integration of Lean and BIM processes (McHugh et al, 2019). A cloud based digital LPS is also reviewed by McHugh et al (2021a) as well as reality capture (McHugh et al, 2021b). By carrying out academic research on the Book of Cases 2022, it is hoped that the range of tools and techniques currently being used in Ireland are identified and associated benefits and challenges uncovered.…”

Digitalizing Collaborative Planning in Design – a Case Study

“…A paper by McHugh et al (2021) looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected LPS in production. It is a case study that shows how a digital version of LPS can increase productivity while maintaining the health and safety of the workforce.…”