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
Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 10 What was the Lean solution? GRAHAM evaluated the capabilities of a range of software development systems, and, after a rigorous selection process, VisiLean was identified as the most suitable solution.VisiLean is a simple yet powerful Production Management Platform for managing large programmes of work. As a cloud-based platform developed on proven Lean Construction principles,VisiLean ensures flow, value generation, and waste minimisation across workflows. Figure 1. Primary components of VisiLean VisiLean allows organisations to visualise project plans at a programme level, with a typical Gantt that supportsTask creation and even Plan import from P6,MSP and Excel, for example.Teams then utiliseVisiLean to drive the Last Planner® System (LPS) for collaborative planning. It allows all teams to par ticipate, visualise their commitments, discuss any potential issues, and map them in the look-ahead planning view. Once a clear look-ahead picture is defined with the teams par ticipating on the platform, each member usesVisiLean, either through the browser or the Mobile App (LiveSite), to update the progress on their commitments and flag any issues that require the team’s attention.They supplement this with Notes that allow for healthy discussions during the collaborative review sessions. Figure 2. Clear capture of shor t-falls, constraints, and conversations Finally, all of this data populates a completely automated Dashboard that promotes a focus on Value Drivers that can help improve the planning and delivery of commitments as a team. As the commitments did not form par t of our delivery programme, we had to try and organise the commitments into more manageable sub-groups.The sub-groups were identified as function areas which exist within GRAHAM, for example, customer, stakeholder, quality, or Lean. Next, we completed Master Planner sessions where we placed all 80 commitment milestones on a programme and then worked backwards to understand what other sub-tasks we may have to deliver to ensure that we would meet the commitment milestones. GRAHAM now has a solid and more detailed 5-year programme for delivery.The commitments programme could have been produced directly intoVisiLean, but we used spreadsheets and then impor ted them intoVisiLean. As our commitments are only over 5 years, we decided to run the collaborative planning meeting at 10:00 on the first Tuesday of every month. Challenges Setting up the LPS was challenging for the commitments for several reasons: • There was no existing programme for the commitments, and the original dates that were identified in our tender were from almost 4 years prior.As expected, the programmes had changed significantly since then. • Some commitments have evolved since the contract andtherefore more in-depth conversations had to be had with National Highways surrounding the amendment of contractual commitments to suit the current environment. • Setting up the initial workshops and allocating owners to provide updates. • Adaptations had to be made withinVisiLean to make the system suit non-construction-related activities.TheVisiLean team worked closely with us to swiftly make amendments. Meeting Format • Discipline leads within GRAHAM meet virtually on the first Tuesday of each month. • The leads will have submitted progress updates throughout the month using their mobile devices. • During the meeting, each discipline lead will take turns to run through their commitments for that month. Case 2
Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 11 Case 2 • Any re-planning is then done with full consent from the rest of the team. • Completed commitments will already be marked as complete, but non-complete tasks will need to be pushed to a new date along with a reason for non-completion. VisiLean has resulted in major improvements, including the cer tainty it has provided to us in delivering on our contractual commitments. National Highways has really suppor ted GRAHAM by engaging in this new way of working and acting as the quality assurance approver for the commitments.Working collaboratively alongside the client on the same platform suppor ts the ambition to work as an alliance with trust and transparency. We are not only meeting but exceeding contractual requirements made by our client, National Highways, by driving Lean initiatives such as Collaborative Planning, identifying waste within the programme and construction processes, smoothing the flow and creating a pull system – meaning the programme is led from bottom-up with updates provided by the people that do the work. Figure 3. Clear capture of project conversations We have noticed that staff now have increased time to concentrate on more value-adding activities. Traditionally, the people doing the work more often than not did not engage in the programme. Now, our programme is led by our staff who have full accountability of their tasks. Not only is this more efficient, but we have seen an improvement on behavioural maturity assessments conducted on behalf of National Highways.There is much more communication and collaboration amongst the team, with a willingness to try and support one another. VisiLean enhances communication through a simple interface that promotes conversation, allows users to add notes, drawings, pictures, and voice notes against each commitment.This data is par ticularly useful as it provides a lessons learned log for any given commitment. National Highways uses this information to share and increase maturity of its supply chain, suppor ted by its data-driven improvement initiative. We have detailed visibility of live commitment progress and performance in any given area.VisiLean enabled GRAHAM to quickly identify where it was consistently falling shor t on its PPC. The output report fromVisiLean, very quickly and at the press of a button, provided a succinct business case to gain an additional resource.This meant that we have been able to identify a shortfall in our programme commitment to National Highways early in the process. This traditionally would not have been identified until the end of the project when our programme was delayed.We have also found thatVisiLean has strengthened collaboration between our suppor t functions, office staff, and our site workers who add the real value. The live dashboards and intelligence around commitments and highlighted areas, significantly reduce the time spent on reporting and administration. Equally, they provide us with repor ts against value drivers, themes, and potential efficiencies, all of which can be easily and quickly sent to National Highways. Notably, we have achieved 100% commitment programme cer tainty. Lean Initiative Improvements & Impact Figure 5. Single platform for capturing evidence for each commitment Figure 4. PPC of 82% achieved through Nov-Dec 2020 – Design Primary Constraint
Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 12 TheVisiLean team has supported us along the journey and made adaptations to the system to suppor t our needs.This case study illustrates how GRAHAM and VisiLean, along with National Highways as the client, have established an exemplar collaborative par tnership that mirrors the UK Government desire to drive productivity and increase collaboration as referenced in The Construction Playbook. Tracking productivity and focusing on areas for improvement have been industry challenges for some time due to the lack of reliable data. GRAHAM,VisiLean, and National Highways continue to work closely to fur ther expand the process to track productivity, drawing from live data taken directly from site. Finally, our commitment relating to innovation was exceeded through thisVisiLean Pilot as it guaranteed visibility and achieved maximum efficiency. Case 2
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