The Combination of Last Planner System and Location-Based Management System

Olli Seppanen1, Glenn Ballard2 & Sakari Pesonen3

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Abstract

The Last Planner System4 (LPS) and Location-Based Management System (LBMS) both aim to achieve the lean goals of decreasing waste, increasing productivity and decreasing variability. LBMS is mostly known as a scheduling system, but includes control mechanisms. LPS is primarily a control system, but includes a scheduling component; namely, phase scheduling. How best link these two systems together to achieve better project performance? Further, can the LBMS control mechanisms be integrated with LPS? Can phase pull scheduling be integrated with LBMS? The goal of this research is to develop a process and best practices to combine the benefits of LPS and LBMS. Skanska Finland has used the two systems together. They observed that the systems support each other well. Because the planning and controlling methods in different industries can vary, a series of workshops was conducted at a hospital project on the US West Coast, and three other US companies were interviewed, to discover the factors specific to industries where activity-based scheduling systems dominate. By combining these three sources of information to the latest case study results on the stand-alone use of LBMS and LPS, the paper proposes processes to integrate LPS and LBMS in pre-bid master scheduling, pull phase scheduling, look-ahead scheduling, and weekly planning. The proposed processes need to be tested in practice. The hypotheses for future research are that after implementing the proposed process, 1) schedule conformance will improve, 2) project durations will shrink, 3) productivity will increase, and 4) cascading delay chains will show a decrease.

Keywords

Last Planner System, Location based management, Production control, Look-ahead planning, Phase schedules, Lean Construction

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Reference

Seppanen, O. , Ballard, G. & Pesonen, S. 2010. The Combination of Last Planner System and Location-Based Management System, 18th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , 467-476. doi.org/

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