Reducing plan variations in delivering sustainable building projects
Introduction
Sustainable buildings have emerged as high performance properties that are expected to have less impact on the environment. However, it has been well appreciated that complexities in delivering sustainable building projects affect the effectiveness of the delivery process (Cheng and Venkataraman, 2012, Horman et al., 2004, Horman et al., 2006, Salkin et al., 2012). The complexities are mainly related to the newly imposed requirements needed for achieving high sustainability standards, for instance unavailability of eco-friendly materials, complex architectural design, practices against outdated construction laws, conflicting standards and poor skilled workforce. Such complexities have challenged current building planning and delivery processes, and these deficiencies have compromised the reliability of master plans and production plans causing high incidence of plan variations (Lapinski et al., 2005, Riley et al., 2004). Plan variations are influenced by the amount of uncertainty (Wambeke et al., 2012). For example there may be uncertainty as to whether materials and/or equipment are delivered at the right time, or the recurrence of rework due to inexperienced workers, or even the frequency of design errors encountered (Horman et al., 2004, Thomas and Sanvido, 2000). Plan variations not only compromise the delivery of sustainable building projects but when delays occur they are also considered to be a form of waste (Koskela, 2000, Liker, 2004).
In the building industry a key process for the successful delivery of building projects is the production planning process. The production planning process typically includes the coordination of trade contractors, planning of material supply chain, continuous availability of work and contingencies for possible uncertainties involved in completing a task (Eccles, 1981, Gann, 1996). This research highlights the importance of eliminating plan variations in the production planning process as a key improvement in the delivery process of sustainable building projects. Plan variations have significant relation to the ability to effectively and efficiently accomplish the sustainability objectives related to day-to-day construction activities. Previous studies have already demonstrated that traditional planning is often associated with unreliable production plans with great variability, which prolongs cycle times and decreases the outputs of the project by increasing the amount of waste in the construction process (Ballard, 2000, Koskela, 2000). It has been argued that complex building projects, as in the case of sustainable buildings, is where deficiencies of traditional building planning practices are exacerbated (Alarcon et al., 2005, Höök and Stehn, 2008, Thomas et al., 2002). Therefore, the focus of this research is to find out a solution for reducing plan variations while overcoming the effects associated to the complexities in attaining sustainability goals in sustainable building projects.
This research examines the effectiveness of using the Last Planner System (LPS) in reducing plan variations. LPS based on Lean Construction principles is proposed for leading to a more reliable production planning process. A case study involving a sustainable building project was performed to demonstrate how plans variations can be reduced or eliminated while using the LPS. In order to achieve the aim of this research, two research objectives were pursued:
- 1.
To identify and eliminate the main sources of plan variations compromising the attainment of sustainability goals in sustainable building projects
- 2.
To evaluate the extent to which the implementation of LPS reduces plan variations
Section snippets
The principle of the Last Planner System
Koskela (2000) defined Lean Construction as “a way to design production systems to minimize waste of materials, time, and effort in order to generate the maximum possible amount of value in construction”. LPS is based on Lean Construction principles. LPS has been designed for managing construction planning, by emphasizing process efficiency and focusing on achieving objectives (Ballard and Howell, 2003, Faniran et al., 1997). LPS proactively eliminates constraints from activities to conform to
Research strategy/methodology
Case studies are an appropriate research strategy when there is little known about the topics of interest. A comprehensive case study allows the researcher to pursue a progressive strategy, from exploration of a proposition to more focused examination of trials (Stake, 2000). Given the nature of the research objectives constructed in this study, a case study was employed to investigate the effectiveness of using LPS method in reducing plan variations in sustainable building projects.
A main
Case study analysis and results
Project SB-T2 was studied for 17 weeks to address the research objectives of this study. Analysis and results are presented for each stage of the case study as follows:
PPC analysis for G and O activities
This section presents a comparative analysis between ‘O activities’ and ‘G activities’ production performances based on PPC values and average weekly PPC values. The analysis includes differences in production performances before and after LPS implementation in Project SB-T2. The calculation results were then used to plot a graph containing the weekly average PPC values from stage 1 to stage 3 for tower 1 and tower 2 and for each group of activities as seen in Fig. 10. Table 4 was also prepared
Analysis of reasons behind incomplete G and O activities
It is the purpose of this section to examine what Reasons-NC were dominant in ‘O activities’ and ‘G activities’ and how these were altering their frequencies over the three stages of the case study. Reasons-NC were recorded and stratified according to their occurring frequencies. Table 5 was generated in order to present the Reasons-NC that represented the accumulated 80% of all frequencies, in other words, those Reasons-NC that caused most of the incomplete activities. From Table 5 it is
Discussion and conclusions
The performances of on-plan completion obtained from ‘G activities’ and ‘O activities’ before LPS implementation revealed a poor level in both types of activities, completing in average less than 50% of activities planned. Moreover, it was found that there was not a clear dominance of better performance either in ‘G activities’ or ‘O activities’. Therefore, it can be concluded that the production planning process before LPS implementation was unable to generate reliable production plans leading
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2014, Journal of Cleaner ProductionCitation Excerpt :They found that GPP is likely to play a central role in new environmental policies in the European Union and, consequently, provide green SME networks with room for marketing growth. Ochoa (2014) used the Last Planner System (LPS) to develop a more reliable production planning process to reduce plan variations for sustainable building projects in the construction industry. A case study was conducted focusing on the measurement of production performance of activities and the reasons for non-completion before and after LPS implementation.
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