Best practices for design and construction supply chains

By Samir Emdanat, Digby Christian

Until recently, sequential exchange of paper-based documentation was the primary information sharing method between project participants for all design and construction projects. Over time, formal boundaries emerged between the participants and those representations became the focus for managing the project’s information exchanges and transactions. The sequential exchange may work reasonably well in idealized project situations where there is sufficient time to fully develop the design intent, evaluate it, and then revise it as many times as required prior to fabrication and installation. However, in complex project situations, owners and their design and construction teams find that they must work in parallel and with incomplete information.

Integrated project delivery (IPD) is an emerging delivery system with a structure that promotes collaboration across organizational boundaries. At the same time, IPD presents project teams with a new challenge. In addition to designing and delivering a facility that meets owner’s goals within budget and schedule, teams must also define a flow of information suitable for the specific project challenges and their individual team’s capabilities. They will need to identify how they can collaborate to increase overall value and eliminate waste.

A supply chain for a project
A supply chain is the system of organizations, people, processes, information flows, technologies, and materials involved in the planning, design, and realization of a project and delivering it to the customer. A team is part of a supply chain whenever it receives information or material from an external team, transforms it in some manner, and then hands it over to some other team.

Design and construction supply chains form to deliver a specific project and persist until it is completed. In this respect, a project’s supply chain is designed. It is assembled in a short period at the start of the project or even during the course of the project. As such, project supply chains can be designed to operate poorly or very effectively. They have the potential of being organized and ultimately managed. The challenge for design and construction teams is that the structure of the supply chain is generally implicit, its behavior is difficult to predict, its outcomes are uncertain, and consequently it is very difficult to control.

Our experiences have shown that whenever design and construction teams are given the opportunity to step back and look horizontally at their work across organizational boundaries, in the literal sense by mapping the information flow between their activities, opportunities for improvement immediately become apparent. This is regardless of project type, complexity, or contractual arrangement.

Process map case study— We recently examined the information flow for approving steel shop drawings starting with the detailer until the reviews are returned to the detailer. The issue that the team identified is that while the schedule provides 30 days for the review, it rarely made it back on time to the detailer. Figure 1 illustrates the process map for this information exchange.

Figure 1 (Click here to see diagram) : Process mapping is one way to easily identify waste in the supply chain. This one identified 22 days of waste in a 30 day cycle for a structural steel shop drawing submittal process.
Ghafari Consulting

Reading from left to right on the diagram, the detailer produces six copies of each submittal containing approximately 100 sheets (23 in total). Each set is sent from the detailer to the fabricator, to the general contractor, to the construction manager, to the architect, and finally to the engineer using overnight delivery. Each party receives the set, reviews it briefly, keeps a copy for the record, then passes the remaining copies downstream. The team calculated 12 days before the engineer receives the set and roughly 15 to 20 days before it is back to the detailer with an approximate eight days of engineering review in between.

Immediately, it became apparent that the delays are not any team member’s fault, but rather a symptom of an elongated process that despite it being under the overall team’s control, no single team had control over the entire process. An unintended discovery was that many of the paper copies were not required. The architect, for example, in an effort to accelerate the review process, was scanning the set and uploading it to an FTP site for the engineer’s use. They had no use for two of the three sets they received. Looking further upstream, those shop drawings were available in PDF before they left the detailer’s office for distribution as hard copies and could have been available for the engineer the day they left the detailer’s office. Now the team has a starting point to consider simple low-risk adjustments to this process to reduce waste and increase value.

If this team had the opportunity to influence the process before it started, they might have discovered that the detailer was going to use a model-based detailing system to produce all their shop drawings. They might have identified greater efficiencies if the detailer submitted this model to the engineer for approval before they produced any of the shop drawings. The total review time could have been reduced to less than eight days.

Further, the owner and the team might have recognized that if the fabricator was available earlier during the design process, they would have been able to incorporate alternative steel sizes and connection details into the design that are easier to fabricate. The fabricator would have eliminated numerous requests for information they had to issue at the start of construction. The later thinking is in the domain of expanded possibilities that IPD offers to project teams. This not only applies for simple discipline-to-trade interactions like in the previous example, but also for exploring possibilities for complex information exchanges between different disciplines and trades. In addition, it opens possibilities for improving not only the information exchanges, but also the definition of the design problem itself.

Best practices for IPD teams
Obviously, there is nothing more challenging than trying to produce a solution for a problem that has incomplete and contradictory requirements, each with competing evaluation criteria, and trying to solve that problem with a large multi-disciplinary team each responsible for solving a part of that problem based on input from others. Designing is a problem of exploration with infinite solution spaces and infinite possible solutions. It is solved by many people and for a long time. The final solution — which is a coordinated and constructible design that meets the owner’s goals and which can be built within schedule and budget — is therefore unique in that by the time it is discovered there is not much time left to go back and find better solutions without increasing the final cost or schedule duration. The team’s chances of exploring paths that are likely to produce better designs increase if they approached the problem collaboratively and with more sources of input. In addition, by careful planning of the process, the team can increase their chances of finding solutions that are more successful by eliminating wasteful activities that consume their resources.

When IPD teams are assembled, they are initially faced with the challenge of deciding how they will organize themselves so they can collaborate effectively, what processes they will follow, and in what sequence. For many, this is probably the first time they have had the opportunity to influence that supply chain in any meaningful way.

Below is a sampling of our best practices that we employed independently or jointly based on observing, assisting, and managing various project teams to plan their design and construction activities and manage their design representations working under various collaborative project arrangements.

Plan the process— The most effective way to start the process is to have the key project stakeholders — those that are responsible for the design of the product and those responsible for its evaluation — engage in a well-facilitated conversation about how they will approach the planning and the design of the project. The participants need to be the ones doing the work. This conversation needs to touch on design decision making as well as the envisioned processes and technologies for sharing and evaluating design representations.

An effective way to start that conversation is in front of a large white board where the team can visually represent their ideas and begin to connect them to develop a shared understanding of that process. The objective is identify the key inputs, key goals, decision making points, key activities, key dependencies, and areas of uncertainty. This establishes the starting point for subsequent more focused conversations to improve this shared understanding, determine strategies to reduce uncertainty, refine goals, and identify milestones and key deliverables. The idea is to make the overall project plan visible to all participants. With each revision, the plan becomes more specific. New constraints are identified and strategies for eliminating those constraints are implemented.

Redefine deliverables— As the process map develops, deliverables become more specific. Abstract deliverable descriptions such as schematic design, detailed design, and implementation documents should be avoided. Each deliverable needs to describe a system or a component. It needs to be connected to the decisions that need to be made in order to fully complete that deliverable so that additional design work can be completed without risking large rework cycles. In addition, the team must begin to address how design representations will be produced and shared and who is best positioned to produce them.

The team should begin to map their shared understanding of how they will accomplish key goals of the IPD process. For example, one requirement is that the design should never exceed its target cost. This is a simple and clear requirement, but how exactly the team will achieve that goal is less clear. Process mapping will keep the team from following the traditional path of designing then pricing the design to see if it is within budget and will invite discussions between the estimators and the designers to create a new process.

Identify savings— Cycles of long-duration generic tasks followed by review tasks needs to be identified and eliminated. In most cases, the review process can be embedded within the design activity. The team can ask themselves what the review entails and what can be done during the design process to verify compliance sooner. If that is not possible, the design team and the review team need to meet more frequently to review the in-progress design (preferably using the 3D model). This can potentially elongate the actual design task duration, but the net effect is time savings, as the team will eliminate negative iteration.

Integrate modeling— Model-based design and detailing provides additional opportunities to increase certainty and reduce risk. As soon as models are developed, the team needs to make them the focus of frequent multi-discipline design reviews. A reasonable goal to set for the modeling effort is that design is not complete until it is fully coordinated, meets owner’s goals, is constructible, and is within its target budget. Tools that do not support the direct flow of information from design to fabrication will ultimately add layers of rework, uncertainty, and risk to the process and will consume resources.

Conclusion
To summarize, using IPD can help achieve significant return on investment to all team members. However, there are so many ingrained practices in the information flows from design to detailing to fabrication to construction that are based on years of the industry operating in isolation and are fundamentally at odds with achieving the required level of collaboration. The IPD contract creates the environment for change to happen, but it is up to each team to take advantage of that opportunity. This requires that they identify how they operated in the past, the limitations and the waste involved in that method of operation, new ways to deliver value and eliminate waste through increased collaboration, different ways of using technology, and new methods for planning the design and construction activities. How far a team can take this will depend largely on how high they set their goals and how effective and reliable a supply chain they will design.

Samir Emdanat is director of Ghafari Consulting and an industry-recognized leader in integrating VDC and Lean Project Delivery to maximize the efficiency of the project’s design and construction supply chains. He currently consults on or directs the implementation of Lean and VDC construction initiatives for a number of owners including automotive, governmental, hospitality, healthcare as well as contractors and architects/engineers around the country. Emdant can be reached at semdanat@ghafari.com. Digby Christian is a senior project manager at Sutter Health. He handles all phases of design and construction of healthcare facilities from business plan validation and initial concept through design, entitlements, permitting, construction, move in, and initial operation.