Cycle-Time Improvement Through Collaborative Planning System

Construction projects especially the residential projects suffer a huge delay due to miscoordination. As a construction project involves a large number of stakeholders, it demands a closed-loop collaboration and seamless coordination for a successful project completion. With more and more regulations such as RERA coming in, completing the project within the stringent timelines is inevitable. Collaborative planning system (CPS) is one of the most easy to understand yet most difficult to implement lean management concept for any construction project. CPS is a comprehensive lean management concept that encompasses the benefits of lean tools such as last planner system, big rooms, PPC, and root cause analysis. The site under study has shown a considerable savings in time in the overall phase through cycle-time tracking against the day-wise plan for typical floors. A combined result of utilizing the major lean tools enabled the project team to continuously achieve 6–7 days of cycle time. Further extending the micro-monitoring to above terrace works facilitated the completion in average 39 days against the pre-planned duration of 60 days. The implementation has resulted in a saving of approximate 50 days (12% time) for the phase which facilitated over-and-above cost benefits due to early demobilization of resources. This paper captures the comprehensive lean thinking and construction site-based implementations incorporating the lean tools.