Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 85, 15 December 2014, Pages 276-288
Journal of Cleaner Production

Reducing plan variations in delivering sustainable building projects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.01.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Lower productivity found in activities with relation to sustainable deliverables.

  • Critical areas related to poor production performance were found.

  • The implementation of LPS resulted in significant reduction of plan variations.

  • Reduction of plan variations was found related to increments in productivity.

Abstract

In line with promoting the mission of sustainable development, the sustainable building practice has been increasingly adopted in recent years. However, the process of delivering a high performance sustainable building has led to a more complex construction practice through the increment of specialized processes. Such complexities have affected construction sequencing and timing, leading to workflow variability and excess in the estimated construction time and cost. In this study reducing plan variations is considered a key improvement in the delivery process of sustainable building projects. This research used the Last Planner System (LPS) to develop a more reliable production planning process to reduce plan variations. 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. The critical areas relating to poor production performance of activities were identified. Results demonstrated differences in production performance and causes of plan variations between activities in relation to and with no relation to sustainable deliverables. While the difference in the production performance is not considerable, the difference in the causes of variability is significant. The implementation of LPS resulted in a significant reduction of plan variations. As variability decreased, production performance of activities increased. The findings from this study contribute to alternative methods for an effective production planning process for 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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