Lean Construction: Pull Planning Better Practices Using BIM 360 Plan

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Hi, why don't we go and get started. So good afternoon, everyone, my name is Mike Zeppieri. I'm the Director of Innovation Services with Skanska USA Building I apologize if my voice is a little hoarse. I went a little bit too hard last night at the after party. The last thing I remember was head banging with the Night King to "Enter Sandman" screaming, King in the North. So I threw out my voice a little bit, so I apologize for that.

So we're here to talk about Lean. So The organization that I'm a part of, it's Skanska USA Building, international organization. We're BIM/VDC-focused, we do what BIM/VDC organizations do for large CMs. But the other hat that I wear is I'm one of the Lean champions in the company. Just so happens that my career has bounced into a lot of different industries. I started in the military, wandered into manufacturing for 10 years, and then came back to construction about five years ago just as Skanska was starting to adopt Lean.

So the timing was kind of interesting for me. You know, Lean in Skanska started as a grassroots effort, and a lot of our offices-- so Seattle, our Seattle office really blazed the trail with Lean The Boston office shortly thereafter, which is where I sit.

So what you're going to see today is a perspective of a company that's about two or three years into its Lean journey. And what we've put together is a really-- I think a really good Lean culture where we're training all of our people in Lean principles. So whether you're in operations in the field or pre-construction or marketing or business development or anything in-between, everyone is receiving the same training so that we're all speaking the same language.

So you're going to get a little bit of a snippet of that in terms of how we train Lean at Skanska. So it's good to have the context of the process before we jump into the tool, and then I'm going to be showing you how we're actually using BIM 360 Plan on our pull plans.

OK, so I split up the presentation into kind of three components. Where I choose to kind of focus my effort, it's been largely going to be dependent on the feedback I get from the people in the room right now. So just give me a show of hands-- who here has received formal Lean training in some capacity? OK, so not many. How many people in the room have actually done a pull plan before? OK, so about half.

OK, so we have some people that are maybe experienced in Lean for the first time. And Some that have some experience with pull planning. So I'll try to balance the time between both.

You know, these are the objectives. I don't need to dwell on these, this is what got you in the door. But this is how I'm going to structure the presentation today. So like I said, I'm going to give you a snippet of how we train Lean at Skanska. I think it's good for people to understand the underlying principles of what Lean is before we dive into the actual process of pull and how pull kind of fits into the overall notion of Lean.

And then I'm going to talk about how we set up a pull plan. So the hardest part of a pull plan to me is the prep work that you do before you actually bring yourselves into the room or puts stickies on the wall. So I'm going to talk about some of the things that I like to do to prep to make sure there's a successful pull plan, choosing the right milestone, and everything in-between. And then I'm going to show you how we use the software to complement that process.

OK. So to start out, kicking off, we'll use a little video.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Hi, guys. What's going on?

- Buzzword bingo.

- Buzzword bingo?

- Shh! These innovation meetings are killing us.

- The hype, the jargon.

- The buzz words.

- Every time you hear one, you mark your card.

- In short, we are 100% committed to facilitating a culture of out-of-the-box, goal-oriented, value-added, disruptive web 3.0--

- Bingo!

[END PLAYBACK]

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: So buzzword bingo-- so I use an exercise when I train Lean at Skanska to kind of get an understanding where people's heads are in terms of their understanding of Lean. So someone from the front here, why don't you throw out a buzzword. When you think of Lean, what's a buzzword that comes to mind?

AUDIENCE: Last planner.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Last planner? All right, so you know what you're talking about. Someone over here? What's a buzzword when you think about Lean? What'd you hear?

AUDIENCE: Agile.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Agile? OK, software development, Agile. Software developer version of Lean. How about over here?

AUDIENCE: Process?

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Process? OK. Someone in the back? Waste, good. Thank you. My plant in the audience. OK. So when I do this exercise with people that are experiencing Lean for the first time, most people understand that Lean comes from manufacturing, most people know that it had something to do with process and continuous improvement. I think people get that, but what a lot of people don't get-- I've done this exercise probably a hundred times in the last three years, I've had maybe two or three classes where people have actually identified the most important component of Lean, and that is achieving first time quality and a focus on what the customer values.

And the reason why that distinction is important-- and maybe it's not intuitive why that distinction is important, but the reason why that distinction is important is if you have a process that is fundamentally flawed or fundamentally inefficient and all you do is get better at executing that process, are you really truly improving things? No you're just getting better at producing waste, you're getting better at executing inefficiency.

So through Lean, what we're asking you to do is try to change your focus on what you perceive or how you perceive improvement through the perspective of waste and eliminating variation from the process. And once you kind of make that mental shift in your head around what truly drives quality, what your customer is truly asking for, it kind of changes where you focus your efforts in terms of what constitutes an investment in process improvement.

So when I do the training, I go through a pretty exhaustive history lesson to kind of explain where Lean comes from. I unfortunately don't have the time to do all of it today, but most people understand that Lean comes from manufacturing, it has its origins in craft manufacturing through the Age of Enlightenment. But the Industrial Age, the early 20th century is where the story really starts.

So when factories started to come into play, and here we are mass producing things at an unprecedented scale, they were really three philosophies in terms of what should drive a factory, what should be the primary consideration.

So the first was this notion of rate. Doesn't matter if the products are good that are coming off the assembly line, but as long as all my workers are busy and the factory is humming and I'm saturating the market with products, that's how I'm going to beat my competition. So there was this philosophy around rate.

There was another philosophy around engineering. That you can distinguish yourself in the market by over-engineering your competition. Producing higher quality or better products, better engineered products.

And then there was one that was the focus on quality. But it didn't matter how many things you produced, but the things that you produced, what really mattered, you needed to get them right the first time.

So these were kind of the three philosophies that were driving manufacturing just prior to World War II. On the tail end of World War II-- and not to oversimplify World War II, but of those three philosophies, which mindset do you think took root in the United States after World War II? Rate, right?

World War II largely a war of attrition-- I mean, again, not to oversimplify it, but it was a war of attrition. We mobilized our entire country to manufacture things at an unprecedented rate. Men have gone off to war, women have now entered the workforce, we can't just turn all that off when the war is over, right? So the factory that was making tanks is now making washing machines. The factory that was making bombers is now making commercial aircraft, and you have to keep that engine churning.

And this is what happened in the United States after World War II. Was this idea of rate really took hold in terms of what drove, you know, the big auto and aerospace manufacturers in the United States.

But something very interesting happened in Japan. So post-World War II, MacArthur was tasked with rebuilding Japan. And one of the first things he did was he brought over some gentlemen from the Census Bureau, Professor Edward Deming being one of the most prominent. So these gentlemen from the Census Bureau, they were mathematicians and statisticians, and they happened to be in the quality camp-- they believed in total quality management and that quality should be the driver of manufacturing.

So Professor Deming and his team during the day, they were out counting things for MacArthur, helping with the post-war reconstruction, but at night they were giving lectures. They were giving lectures to Japanese industrialists and the Japanese were listening. So when the Japanese rebuilt their industrial capacity after World War II, they built it from a perspective of quality.

Taiichi Ohno is considered the father of Lean. Worked for Toyota, he was an engineer at Toyota. He listened to what Professor Deming was saying, and he came up what is now known as the Toyota Production System. I mean, Honda, Mitsubishi, Yamaha, most of the Japanese companies were doing something similar, but Toyota really perfected it. And they came up with the Toyota Production System.

What's really ironic about this whole story is that the whole idea of total quality management actually originated in the United States, and most people attribute Henry Ford with the moving assembly line, and that was one of his chief innovations, but the other idea that he actually introduced into manufacturing was this idea of total quality management. So Taiichi Ohno was the father of Lean and Professor Deming was the grandfather, you know, Henry Ford was the great grandfather of Lean.

So fast forward to the 1980s. I grew up in a blue collar household just outside of New York City. You came into my parents' house, there was a Subaru in the driveway, there was a Sony on the mantle, there was a Yamaha stereo system in the family room, which was incredibly problematic from my grandfather, who had Japanese shrapnel in his leg until the day he died. He fought in World War II. You know, he'd coming to our house on the holidays in his rusting piece of shit to Chrysler. What are you doing buying all this Japanese shit? You should be buying American.

Well, the research team at MIT decided to take a look at this. How is it that a country that was brought to its knees militarily 40 years later is now able to compete with America in high barrier-to-entry markets? They weren't building action figures and plastics. I mean, this was automotive and consumer electronics. How is it possible?

So a team-- Professor Womack from MIT and his team, they went and they looked at it and they wrote a book called The Machine That Changed the World. So for those of you that are just diving into Lean, this is where the term Lean was coined, this is where you should start your journey. The Machine That Changed the World goes into what I just kind of explained to you in a lot greater depth and it's a really insightful book.

They wrote a follow-on book called Lean Thinking. And what they did was they distilled the Toyota Production System. down to five things-- value, the value stream, flow, pull, and the pursuit of perfection. And the reason why that's important is because the Toyota Production System is very manufacturing-centric. But by distilling Lean down to these five things, this is where Lean started to creep into other industries. So Agile development sprung from this. The fact that we now have Lean in construction sprung from this.

So the reason why that's important and how this all fits together-- so if you understand what your customer values, and Womack defines value is what the customer is willing to pay for and that they expect you to get it right the first time. So if you understand what your customer values, and you know where you sit on the value stream-- so no single person in this room can deliver a building to a client in and of themselves, right? We're all part of an ecosystem, an industry-- we're all part of a value stream. So if you understand what your customer values, you understand where you fit in the value stream, the ideal scenario is that we all work collaboratively and achieve flow.

And the best way to think about flow is traffic patterns. You know how far you live from your office if you drive to work every day. If everyone obeyed the speed limit and was conscientious towards other drivers, traffic patterns would be largely predictable, right? What disrupts traffic patterns? There's disruptions, variation. Somebody cuts off someone else that causes someone else to slam on their brakes and it has a ripple effect. There's an accident. There's a lane closed because of construction. There's variation-- variation disrupts flow, and it impacts productivity.

So the idea of pull and where pull planning comes from is that you're going to use the tool and the concept of pull to expose the sources of variation that are causing disruption on your job sites. I mean, that's really what the concept of pull is, and as we go further into the presentation, I'll talk a little bit more about how you actually execute it.

And then perfection. So when I give this training, you know, again, I'm not a construction guy. I have a construction degree, but I spend most of my career in other places. You know, there's always a superintendent that'll stand up when I give the training. They're like, Mike, that's great. Great history lesson, we all appreciate the story, but this is construction. We don't have builders coming off of an assembly line. It's not a controlled environment.

And I said, you're absolutely right. However, however, there are still some process consistency from one job to the next. Skanska's building three residential towers in Boston right now. At the end of the day, how much different are those three residential towers from each other? Yes, there are architectural features that are unique to each. There are logistical challenges relative to where the site sits in an urban environment that are unique. But in terms of actual nails and wood, the process is largely the same from one to the next.

So why wouldn't you want to try to control the things that you can control so that the things that are going to disrupt you anyway are less disruptive? Why not try to control what you can control so the things that are going to disrupt you anyway do not disrupt your products?

So what are you trying to do when you conduct the pull plan? So what you're really looking for is waste. So the Toyota Production System identifies eight sources of waste. So these are the lenses that you should be looking at any process through to really understand the root cause. If I bring a bunch of foremen, a superintendent, and the project engineers into a trailer and say, what's going wrong with this job site? It's just going to be a wave of noise, right? And then hearing that wave of noise, how am I going to be able to determine the root cause of what's really driving inefficiency on the project.

So when you focus people on evaluating variation through the lenses of waste, you focus their attention to the. root cause.

So in a pull plan, this is what you're looking for. You're looking to expose the sources of waste. And the way some of these lenses work-- I mean, some of them are pretty intuitive.

Rework. Not getting something right the first time.

Waiting. A trade comes to your site, they're not able to execute what they were planning to execute for the day because of the trade that was supposed to hand off to them didn't finish their work the previous day but no one told them that, and now you've wasted their time bringing a crew on-site for work that they can't perform.

Motion. Delivery of materials to a job site before they're ready to be installed. What are the implications if you have material sitting on your job site and you're having to move them constantly to make room for other work? What are some of the implications?

AUDIENCE: Damage.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Damage? What else? Safety.

AUDIENCE: Delays.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Delays. They can get stolen.

AUDIENCE: Can't find them.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Can't find them.

AUDIENCE: They move five times.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: They move five times, yeah. So when you look at things through the lenses of waste, you can get to the root cause of what's driving that and maybe you can prevent those things from happening and impacting your job site. So that's what we're trying to do because waste is what drives variation.

So, I hope this audio doesn't blow your ears out, I'll stop if it does.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the way you can think of the value stream-- he knows what I'm doing. If you think about the value stream in terms of a chain, each of us are a link on the chain. All right, my timing was a little off on that, I apologize.

So if you take a chain and you visualize the value stream as a chain, what happens if you push a chain? It collapses, right? It does something like this. If there is a weak link in the chain that's about to buckle because it's under too much stress, are you going to be able to identify it if it looks like this? No, right? Because it's buried. If that link all the way in the upper right-hand corner, if that one's the one that's about the buckle, you're not going to know until it breaks.

And probably the best example-- and one of my favorite videos for kind of demonstrating just what push is-- is this I Love Lucy episode.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Yes, ma'am.

- Now, the candy will pass by on this conveyor belt and continue into the next room where the girls will pack it. Now your job is to take each piece of candy and wrap it in one of these papers, and then put it back on the belt. You understand?

- Yes, sir-- yes, ma'am!

- Let 'em roll! Let 'er roll! Hmpf! You wait here, somebody is asleep at the switch.

- Phew! What are you doing up here? I thought you were downstairs boxing chocolates.

- Oh, they kicked me out of there fast.

- Why?

- I kept pinching them to see what kind they were. It's the fourth department I've been in.

- I didn't do so well either.

- All right, girls. Now this is your last chance. If one piece of candy gets past you and into the packing room unwrapped, you're fired.

- Yes, ma'am.

- Let 'er roll!

- Well this is easy!

- Yeah, we can handle this old thing.

- Listen! Ethel, I-I-I think-- I think we're fighting a losing game!

Here she comes!

- Well! Fine, you're doing splendidly! Speed it up, Otto!

[END PLAYBACK]

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: All right, so you won't find a better example of what happens in a push-based system. And if you think about a construction site and a construction project, a project schedule is really a push-based system.

I mean, think about how a project schedule is put together. You have a scheduler who's putting together a schedule before the trades are even on the job. And they're assembling that schedule based off of rules of thumb and assumptions, and what they think they know in terms of the flow of the job, and they're going to create it in a very linear, kind of sequential Gantt chart view. And that's suddenly the schedule. And that's what the trades are buying into.

So we're imposing that on the trades without really getting their input on whether or not they can actually deliver to the milestones that are in the schedule.

Well something happens when you put people into that type of situation. When you push work on them without them having the ability to control the flow of work. So in this example, the person upstream from Lucy and Ethel, can they see what's going on as the candies go down the line? They have no idea the impact that they're having on the downstream trade because they don't have a visual connection, there's no communication. And their incentive is probably to send as many piece of the chocolate down that line as they can, right?

You heard that the manager, what was the premise that she said? Not quality. Every piece of chocolate that come by your station better get wrapped or you're fired. So an incredible amount of pressure on Lucy and Ethel, and if you look at the beginning of the video, they're being very methodical, very careful, they're wrapping each piece of chocolate. But then as the rate of chocolate starts to increase, what happens?

AUDIENCE: They eat them.

MICHAEL ZEPPIERI: Well they eat them, right? They start taking shortcuts, right? Quality has now gone down. They're hiding defects. Rather than expose to the manager that they can't keep up with the production rate, they start hiding defects.

And think about the next person. So the next room, those chocolates are going to a place where they're going to have to get packed, right? So now that person is receiving chocolates that have not been wrapped properly, so now they're having to do the work that the previous step needed to do and rework it. And I guarantee you that that person in the packing room has targets too-- how many boxes go out the door. And if they don't hit their targets, they're the ones that are going to get fired.

But if they don't hit their target, whose fault was it that they didn't hit their target? The person sending the chocolates at the beginning of the line without consulting with the people downstream as to whether or not they can handle the demand.

So this is what happens in a push-based system. And these are the applications.

Buffers. Think about traffic again. It takes you 30 minutes to get to work every day. Except for that one day that there was a traffic accident, and now you're 15 minutes late and you missed a meeting, and after you get chewed out from your boss for being late, what are you going to do the very next day?

You're going to leave early, right? You're going to create a buffer to protect yourself from that outcome. You're going to keep that buffer for a week, two weeks until you have a late night, you're watching the game, and the alarm clock goes off and you're like, ah, you know what? I can leave five minutes later. And then the next day you leave five minutes later. And pretty soon you're right back to where you started, right? 30 minutes until what happens? The next time you're late, and then you create a buffer.

So this is what's happening on job sites, is your subcontractors are subconsciously creating these buffers to protect themselves because of what they've experienced on other jobs, because of what they've experienced on your job, because the experiences they've had working with other trades on your job that you don't even know about. They're subconsciously creating these buffers to protect themselves.

In the construction industry, if somebody takes a shortcut, does that problem immediately manifest itself? Now right? At the waterproofer is under pressure, and they take a shortcut waterproofing the roof or the foundation. That problem's probably not going to manifest itself for a number of years until there's a rain event and then everyone's going to know about it-- who's going to pay for that? Owner's going to pay for it, right?

This is what happens in a push-based system.

So, now what happens if you pull the chain rather than push the chain? So the idea is when you pull the chain, you're going to be able to more readily identify the link that is under duress because you're talking to them. You're collaborating with them, you're asking them, can they handle the rate of work? You're asking Lucy and Ethel, can they handle the number of chocolates coming down the line? And the weak link becomes more evident.

There's another book out there called The Goal by Eli Goldratt. He introduces an idea known as the theory of constraints. And what Goldratt says, that you should actually plan your project around the weak link-- let them set the pace. So it's a book worth checking out.

So this is what happens on a job site. You've got all these different traits, they're creating buffers, there's variation, they're subconsciously colliding with each other and they don't even know it. So the idea of the pull plan is that you're exposing each of the links and the variation that each of the links is bringing to your job site, and you're focusing on the root cause of that variation and you're purging it from your project.

Notice I'm not talking about accelerating the project. Pull planning is not a magical schedule accelerator. When that project team's calling me and saying, Mike, we're 30 days behind schedule, I need you to do a pull, wrong answer. Pull doesn't magically shave time off the schedule.

However, I will tell them, if you're 30 days behind schedule, that's because you've got some real problems on your job site, and I can help you stop the bleeding through a pull plan to find the root cause-- that I can do. But a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to do a pull plan, I'm going to shave two months off the schedule, that's not how it works.

So what's the difference between pull planning and the last planner system? Because a lot of people use those two terms synonymously and they actually aren't. So pull planning is the building block process. That's when you bring the trades into a room and you literally pull the schedule, you pull the milestone. It's the physical activity of the collaboration.

The last planner system is an entire infrastructure of metrics and measures to check whether or not you do what you said you were going to do in the pull plan. And I'll be honest with you, Skanska's not at full last planner system. One of the reasons we've made the investment in BIM 360 Plan is because it's the platform that will enable us to get to last planner. But we're kind of like in an interim state.

So the way we introduce Lean at Skanska and how we introduced pull planning was first we train our people and got them to buy into the idea. Then we train our subcontractors. And we did pull planning without any expectation that we were going to change the schedule. Let's just do this thing. Let's pick an easy milestone that we know we're going to hit anyway and let's just pull it just to validate the milestone, so people get a sense for the process and we get their buy-in.

Phase three, which is where we're at right now, is we're actually taking the pull plans and using BIM 360 Plan to do weekly work planning. So we're actually using the outcome of the pull plan to drive how we execute on the job, which is a pretty good place to be. And then the next phase is where we're actually running the metrics to see how effective we are. This is kind of like the return on investment side of pull planning through the last planner system, is you actually have metrics that will tell you how much you've saved in terms of time or cost or anything in-between.

But the last planner system is an incredibly sophisticated model. And I warn project teams and whenever I speak at Lean Construction Institute, you know, my warning that I give to people who don't jump from nothing to the last planner, you're going to frustrate your people, you're going to frustrate your superintendents, they're going to lose in it because it's not going to seem like it's working. Start small. Start with pull planning, pick milestones that you know you're going to hit, and then start to build towards this.

All right, so pull plan preparation. How do you plan for a pull plan? So how do you pick a good milestone? So that's your typical schedule, and the schedule is basically broken up in terms of task to perform and milestones to complete. Now where the industry is heading-- and I think where I'd like to see things go, is the tasks to perform are highly subject to variation, right? So what the scheduler puts into the schedule-- I mean, how many of you have been on a job where the task on the schedule is actually how they were executed on the job site?

I wasn't expecting to see any hands. I know I've never seen a project where it goes according to schedule, because there's a lot of assumptions that go into those tasks. To the point where you have to start questioning why you even want to put those tasks into the schedule to begin with.

What the schedule should tell you is your milestones. The work that contractually needs to get done. The owner expects to occupy the building on this date. We have to winterize the building by this date. There's a long lead procurement item that we need to order on this day. Excavation needs to start on this date. I mean, there's certain hard things that have to happen to set the cadence for a project, so have those in your schedule, those are your milestones. Put all the tasks that are subject to manipulation and coordination, that's where the money is on your pull plan.

So how do you choose a milestone? So the most important thing is that you choose something that has a discrete start and finish. Again, when project teams engage me and say, Mike, we want to do a pull plan, we're behind schedule. OK, what am I pulling to? What's your milestone? There needs to be a discrete start and finish to the activity.

And I use three rules of thumb on the milestones that I pick. So the first is a milestone where there is a lot of sophistication and a lot of handoff between trades. It is not impossible to take too small of a bite out of the schedule when you're dealing with sophisticated handoffs. We did one in Boston where there was a lot of handoff between a lot of different state agencies in the state of Massachusetts. A lot of complexity, a lot of coordination that was literally to erect a pedestrian bridge over a right of way over a weekend. The number of agencies we had to engage just to do that one simple task was incredible.

So we pulled it. Because there was no clear, how do we get from point A to point B, and every single agency had a different opinion of how we were going to get there, so we pulled it. Two days' worth of work. Went flawlessly , something that we probably would have stumbled over had we not pulled it.

So it is possible to take too big of a chunk. So if you're doing pull plans for four or five, six-month durations, you should question that. But high complexity with a lot of handoffs, or is it a sequence with a lot of repetitive, repeatable work? And what I say about that is, fitted out of an apartment complex, right? Where every unit is essentially the same. Where you can almost get a factory dynamic, right? So the cars aren't coming down the assembly line, the crews are going to the cars. Hospital, patient towers, things like that. These are all your opportunities for pull planning where there's a lot of repetitive work.

And the last is if there's a milestone of particular interest to the client or owner. So we've done pull planning on milestones because the owner is concerned about that milestone that we're going to hit it and they want just the transparency and the confidence that we're going to hit it, so we offer them a pull plan. So that's how you choose a milestone.

So you set the expectations of the pull plan. So one, we're trying to achieve flow. You know, I already said this-- pull planning is not a scheduling accelerant, so don't go into the pull plan expecting we're going to shave all this time off the schedule. Now I have done pull planning where we have shaved time off the schedule. I mean, it is possible, but don't go in with that expectation.

And really, to identify the constraints. The variation that's going to impact your project and your schedule that you wouldn't otherwise have identified in the schedule alone.

So how do you set up BIM 360 to support your pull plans? So there's certain realities. So the reality for me in Boston, I mean, I know BIM 360 Plan, the vision of the tool is that everyone's sitting on an iPad or on the cloud and they're collaborating together doing the sticky notes on the computer. I will say that that is not a very productive and successful model, at least it hasn't worked for us.

I like the collaboration of getting people on the wall with the sticky notes. We've tried to do it with the technology and what happens is everyone starts checking their email, surfing the internet, they get distracted-- the industry just isn't there. The technology isn't as interactive as it needs to be to facilitate using the tool-- to facilitate the actual pull plan. So I like sticky notes on the wall, people talking, marking up drawings-- I know it's a little old school, but people seem to be-- the foremen are very receptive to that.

But I could take BIM 360 Plan and use it to capture what we learned in the pull plan and then generate the reports and the metrics that we need to actually derive benefit from having done the pull plan. So it's a balancing act, but that's what seems to work for us is to do it manually, but then use the technology to capture the metrics and the data once you start executing.

OK, so some of the things that you should think about when you're setting up BIM 360 Plan. So what are the measures and metrics that are important to you? I mean, at the end of the day, BIM 360 Plan is a database with some flags that you can use to filter data in terms of the execution of the project and to evaluate flow. So what reports are you going to generate and for who?

What I've learned and what I've seen is that the biggest beneficiary of pull planner is actually the owner. The owners that we've worked with absolutely love the process. They actually take the time to set-- either sit in themselves or send their owner's reps to sit in with us. And they're not going to log into Plan and look at what we did, but they love the PDF reports that we can spit out to them and then mark them up in Bluebeam and send them back to us.

It's gotten to the point now where some of the owners that we've worked with have actually asked us to come in and consult and teach their people how to do Lean on stuff totally unrelated to construction. Because they like the process, they like the structure of it, you know, they see the value in exposing waste, which is applicable really to any process, that you don't have to do it in construction.

The other is how can you get the subcontractors on board? Well, the funny thing about the subcontractors is, a lot of them will push back initially, but once they see that they are the biggest beneficiaries to the process, they're your biggest advocates. One of the first pulls I did-- and I will confess, it was one of the first pulls I did and I crashed and burned horribly. We didn't do adequate prep. The superintendent wasn't on board, kept leaving the trailer. The subs weren't really getting it.

But there was one sub in the room that understood what we were trying to do, and he came up to me at the end and he said, you know, Mike, I know the day didn't go so hot, but I really appreciate what you guys were trying to do. This particular sub, this foreman, we do a lot of work with them, so I run into him a lot.

So the next pull plan I ran into him again. And when I was going through my spiel, he started to kind of chime in and was very supportive. I'd done about five or six pull plans with this guy now, and now when I'm setting up, he comes up and I don't have to ask him and he starts facilitating with me. And he helps the other foremen. And that's the dynamic that you want to achieve.

The foreman, what I have found, once they understand what you're trying to do, they like the collaboration. And they like talking to each other, they don't want to talk to us. They want to talk to each other to figure out how to do these things, so sometimes it benefits us to just step back and let them do what they know. And again, this is meant to be a complement to the schedule, not a replacement.

OK, so when you go into the project admin screen of BIM 360 Plan, and it's not a terribly complicated tool, but there are some things that you can do in it to set yourself up for success. So there's the details, the companies, the locations, and the WBS. We don't use the People feature, because like I said, we're not live in tool for pull plans. If an owner or an owner's rep wants an invitation, we invite him in if they're going to log in, but typically they just ask us to send them PDF reports. So it's usually it's our own people.

Details. Take the time to set your work days and your holidays. I know that's a simple thing, but it will throw off your reports if you don't take that into consideration. So take the time to set those things up.

And also, set up your root causes in terms of what's driving variation or waste on your job site. So one of the things that we're starting to think about, you know, you've heard a lot of lectures probably this week about where analytics and business intelligence and machine learning is going. You know, what if we can track the trends of root causes across all of our jobs? Well we can't do that unless we have a common vocabulary of how we're classifying the root cause.

So one option would be to use the eight wastes as your root cause if your company wants to actually use the Lean terminology. And classify the root cause in terms of the eight wastes, you can do that. Talk to your project controls people, I'm sure most of you are companies that already have a way of tracking these things. You can align it so that BIM 360 Plan is giving you data that already aligns with your project control processes. But take the time to define your root causes.

We don't set a PPC target because we're not doing the last planner yet, but that's something we are, you know, starting to evolve into, one of our targets for next year.

This may seem really silly, but line up the sticky notes with the colors that you use with BIM 360 Plan. It'll make your life a lot easier when you transcribe off the wall. I mean, that may seem like a silly recommendation or pretty intuitive, but take the time to do that so that if Company A is blue in the system, you use blue stickies on the wall, it just helps with the transcribing.

One of the recommendations that we've given to Autodesk is we've asked them to add just more flexibility in the colors when we talked to them about why they chose to the colors they did. I can't say that I can explain it, but, you know, they did understand that we want a little bit more flexibility-- we want to use our corporate branding colors for the stickies and we can't do that today.

Locations. So this is where you can actually start setting the factory dynamic for your project. So what I like to do is when I sit down with the project team who's about to embark on the pull plan is we take out a set of drawings and we start marking it up to create units of work. North, south, east, west, and column lines is typically what we use.

And the reason why that's important is to create a factory dynamic, you need to define the units of work. Include your foreman in this discussion. And the reason why this is important is if you ask a foreman to create a sticky note for an activity, they're going to say, oh, I'm doing waterproofing for the next three weeks, OK? It's going to take me three weeks to finish all the waterproofing, but where are you going to be on Monday? Well, I'm going to be in the northeast corner between column lines A and B.

And the reason why that's important is you can almost-- you know, if you think about it in terms of a factory dynamic, a typical schedule, Gantt chart, waterfall, very linear thinking, right? Sub A is working and then they hand off to sub B and sub C, and the next thing you know, you have a two-month schedule.

Well what if sub A is working in quadrant A today-- on Monday, and then on Tuesday he moves to quadrant B? And then the next sub comes in right behind him and is now working in quadrant A? And they're only staging enough materials to work in that little limited area where you need them to work on that day. You're starting to create that factory dynamic, you're starting to improve the number of handoffs.

One of the things that the Toyota Production System emphasized is this idea of stopping the line. In a Toyota factory, if anyone identifies a quality issue, they're actually empowered to stop the line. And the reason why that's important is because if the root cause of that flaw is systemic to an entire delivery of let's say drive control systems or stereo systems or component-- you know, the navigation systems, if you don't stop the line and figure that out then, you just pull the car off the line and you just keep executing, what's going to happen? That's flaw's going to keep manifesting itself over every single car. That fall, that's why you have defects for thousands of vehicles.