Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 9 GRAHAM is a privately owned contractor with an impressive 200year history. Specialising in building, civil engineering, interior fit-out, facilities management, and investment projects, we operate from a network of regional offices throughout the UK and Ireland. With an annual turnover of GB£808.1m and a healthy GB£1.7bn pipeline of opportunity, we are a trusted delivery partner to a range of prestigious clients across a broad spectrumof sectors. These include education and health, highways and maritime, and commercial and retail. We also participate on over 50 national and regional frameworks. Strengthening our reputation, we are an Investors in People (IIP) Platinum and Health andWellbeing accredited business, and we were named as the inaugural winner of the IIP Excellence in Health andWellbeingAward. With over 2,200 employees, these prestigious benchmarks demonstrate our commitment to being a best practice employer that invests in its people, prioritising their health and wellbeing within a culture of Fairness, Inclusion, and Respect. The Regional Delivery Par tnership is a five-year framework whereby contractors are monitored on both their behaviours and performance. In parallel, they are incentivised to innovate and work efficiently. A central component of National Highways (formerly “Highways England”) NEC Contract 3 model is a requirement for contractors to create the step-change desperately needed within the construction industry. The delivery of commitments is not only impor tant to GRAHAM, but also to our clients. Our P6 Scheme Programme includes everything associated with delivery, but excludes programming for suppor t functions such as tender commitments. From the outset, we identified the potential for software to allow us to programme everything outside of delivery whilst utilising the Lean Last Planner methodology. Our priority was that any proposed tool was cloud-based to meet the challenges presented by Covid restrictions, with the flexibility to run what were historically face-to-face collaborative planning meetings using post-it notes on the wall. What was the problem the Lean initiative was trying to resolve? As par t of the new National Highways Regional Delivery Framework, we were required to deliver 80 additional commitments as par t of our tender.These commitments were established to suppor t the National Highways ambition to move towards an alliance type framework.The commitments are activities which the contactor has agreed to deliver as par t of the framework, with an expectation that they are industry leading in order to generate the much-needed step-change within construction. Each commitment is costed by National Highways, and the consequence of non-delivery is a financial penalty equating to the anticipated cost of that commitment. At the hear t of the GRAHAM Lean Deployment Programme is an understanding of our client needs.We recognised the importance of simultaneously driving delivery and demonstrating progress against these commitments, thus offering cer tainty to our client, National Highways.We also identified significant benefits in breaking these commitments down into more detailed sub-tasks. Initially, commitment delivery was slow and cracks in our process appeared because: • The Covid pandemic meant meeting up and having a collaborative planning session using post-it notes became impossible. • There was no consistent approach for progressing and updating commitments.We did not know how we were progressing with the delivery of our commitments as they were being driven by people spread across different parts of the UK.This meant that people were working on multiple spreadsheets where data and updates were getting missed with no single source of governance. • The plan for commitments, despite being so important to the client, is not factored into the existing P6 Construction Programme.This made it difficult to understand our progress and which commitments required renewed focus. What was the goal of the Lean project? We wanted a simple cloud-based solution that allowed staff to efficiently provide updates on the commitments using mobile technology.The creation of a common platform would remove double data entry requirements and eliminate errors and duplication. Having a bottom-up approach, using a pull flow system, would also generate accountability and increase team engagement. Fur thermore, it would enhance productivity as it removed the time spent pursuing updates.Another requirement was to repor t progress to National Highways via a visual dashboard.This would ensure a focus on key areas identified through utilisation of the last planner methodology. Company Overview GRAHAM graham.co.uk Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques Katie Jones Author Paramjit Lota Author Case 2
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