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Business MANAGING HIGHER ED Revolutionizing Construction Management Lean Construction and the Last Planner System result in a successful project for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. BY JAMES GROSSMANN W HEN A STRIKING NEW residence hall was added to the campus of the Mas- sachusetts College of Art and Design's campus as part of the College's $140M mas- ter expansion plan, it added a distinctive building to the Boston skyline. But Suffolk Construction also utilized a revolutionary new building technique that can point the way for more effi cient construction projects for colleges and universities everywhere. Historically, the construction industry has rarely been considered on the cutting edge. In fact, over the last 40 years, the construction trades have experienced a 20 percent decrease in productivity, while every industry, with the exception of agriculture, has increased productivity by 200 percent. Suffolk Construction, the largest contrac- tor in New England and one of the largest in the country, is reversing this trend with investments in state-of-the-art technologies and management processes. One of our most innovative approaches has been to adopt Lean Construction principles, a productivity- focused scheduling technique based on the revolutionary "just-in-time" manufacturing process developed by Toyota. For the new residence hall we recently built for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) in Boston, our team effectively applied Lean principles and shaved 13 weeks off the original project schedule. The $61M, 21-story residence hall, which adds 493 beds and 145,000 sq. ft. of residential space to the school cam- pus, became the fi rst Lean Constructon project in the City of Boston. RISING ABOVE IT ALL. A new residence hall for the Massachusetts College of Art and Design rises 21 stories and makes a distinctive appearance on the Boston skyline. The building was constructed following the tenets of Lean Construction, a "just in time" approach to project delivery that carefully plans and streamlines the process, resulting in cost, materials, and time effi ciencies not seen in traditional construction methods. Lean Principles At the heart of Lean Construction is the idea that all contributors to the building process — the construction manager and all of the subcontractors — come together at the start of construction to collabora- tively plan the building schedule. On the MassArt project, Suffolk was no longer the only team looking at the master schedule every day; all the trades were involved in day-to-day planning throughout the entire construction process. This early buy-in and close collabora- tion allowed Suffolk to utilize the Last Planner System to eliminate the bottle- necks, wasted time and over-production that are typical of construction projects. The Last Planner System is best defi ned 36 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / NOVEMBER 2012 as trades performing work at the last ap- propriate moment on a project so that the site is prepared for the next subcontractor to immediately start work as part of an effi cient "parade of trades." Subcontractors plan and work around shorter modules and schedules, allowing them to think about projects on a day-to-day basis and consider how their work impacts the other trades on the project. In other words, rather than working on multiple fl oors at once, tradespeople on the MassArt project followed one behind the other to fi nish just a portion of a fl oor at a time. They then stopped every few days to determine their work and adjust the schedule as necessary. The Lean schedule meant that the entire WWW.PLANNING4EDUCATION.COM PHOTO COURTESY OF PETER VANDERWARKER