The VisiLean team actively participated at the ILCC 2021 Conference held at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, during the first week of December. The theme of the Conference was “Reinventing with Lean post COVID”, and was divided into 3 sections over a period of 4 days, starting with the Workshop Day, followed by the Industry Day, and finally ending with two days of Conference. VisiLean was involved through each day in the capacity of expert talks, panel discussions, hosting the Workshop Track – B, and also presenting 3 of their published papers at the Conference.

The workshop – “Decoding the ‘Lean’ in Production Management”, was designed to break down the essence of what it entails to be ‘lean’ through production planning, monitoring, and control of construction projects. The workshop was attended by professionals from the AEC industry, as well as some students, through a hybrid model where they were divided into teams of 5 and engaged in exercises using a hypothetical project. The workshop was designed to understand and analyse the different wastes in the process of managing construction projects- from planning to execution monitoring and come up with alternate lean workflows to manage them proactively.

Challenges to conventional Construction management

Dr. Bhargav Dave, CEO at VisiLean, kicked off the workshop by addressing the participants on the pressing challenges of conventional construction practices due to non-value-adding activities and how projects fail due to no common understanding of value amongst different project stakeholders. This was followed by the first exercise where the teams had to come up with the challenges they have faced in their projects. Some of the common challenges cited by the participants were related to lack of clarity of the scope of work, lack of collaboration, and the need for workflows for the teams to communicate and act at the right time with the right information.

Planning – Preparing production information for execution

The first half of the workshop was about alternate planning of the project by integration of Lean and BIM workflows. The teams discussed the conventional planning approach where they highlighted the missing information from the project schedule provided to them. Following this, the teams were briefed upon implementing and adopting BIM in their projects and the challenges associated with progress monitoring. The teams then participated in a digital collaborative planning session where they made their production plans from the master schedule, discussed constraints, and prepared a 4-week look-ahead in VisiLean.

Integrating Lean and BIM workflows

Once the production plan was made ready by the teams, the next session focused on the benefits of integrating the Lean processes with BIM. The teams could visualize their 4-week look-ahead in the BIM models by linking the production plans with the models along with the constraints. One of the major challenges discussed by the participants during this exercise was the need for the BIM models to be constructible in order to integrate them with the production schedule for accurate site progress monitoring.

Lean production management and Control

With the revised planning approach with Lean BIM integrated workflows, the second half of the workshop focused on production management and control where the teams were educated on the importance of the make-ready process, constraints removal, giving timely updates on the tasks, and establishing a real-time communication workflow with the help of updates from the LiveSite, the VisiLean Mobile App. The teams then collectively reviewed their project progress with the Percent Planned Complete (PPC) metric in the project dashboard to understand the reasons for variance in their execution to develop strategies to act upon these variances and continuously improve.

Workshop Discussion

The intent of the workshop was to break down production management across 3 phases – Production Planning, Monitoring, and Control, and to emphasise the importance of Lean tools and processes at each stage to enable and drive efficiency in the process of construction management.

While many of us have come across Lean tools and processes in the industry today, little is known about the essence of what it entails to be lean and do lean for efficient project execution. Through each stage of planning to execution to monitoring and control, the VisiLean team enabled the participants to realise the core of what lean actually addresses – i.e., coordination, communication, and collaboration across project teams, people, and information sources. Whether this is achieved through collaborative planning, or BIM integrated 4D visualisation, or real-time updates from site; the intent was for participants to take back with them the core of integrating people, processes, and tools appropriately to ensure continuous improvement, better flow, and waste minimisation across all their projects, today!

Way forward

At VisiLean, we are continuously working with teams on projects globally who are driving ‘lean’ tools and processes efficiently. We are also involved with various projects who are deploying BIM from design to execution, where we come across numerous challenges towards appropriating BIM for project execution and monitoring.

With the most powerful and unique Lean-BIM integrated production management engine, VisiLean enables you to successfully deploy BIM for production planning, monitoring, and control. With dedicated support and excellent system interoperability, we respect your teams’ familiarisation with existing platforms and workflows, promising smooth onboarding and transition across the organisation, one step at a time.

If you’d like to experience a true-lean service for yourself, head to the link here to start a fully-featured free trial – https://visilean.com/free-trial/

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