LEAN Facilities Renovation, Repair, and Construction
- Change Management – A comprehensive change management plan is a requirement in the journey to collaboration, transparency, and mutual respect among all participants…. and measurably improved outcomes.
- Improve Budgeting & Resource Allocation – Adopt a common, independent, and objective locally researched detailed construction cost database to better define, communicate, and budget. Focus upon achievable projects that provide maximum benefit to the organization.
- Get Ahead of the Curve, and Stay Ahead – Adopting and implementing a LEAN collaborative construction delivery methodologies is just the start. Require initial and ongoing training for all participants and maintain an environment focused upon continuous improvement.
- Best Value – Value comes first… from best value procurement to the value of life-cycle asset management.
Effective, efficient, and user-friendly renovation, repair, and new construction in support of an organization’s built environment is possible for anyone that is willing to adopt change.
Ongoing renovation, repair, and maintenance consumes the bulk of facilities expenditures for most organization with substantial real property holdings.
Accordingly, adopting industry best practices as a prerequisite for the allocation and subsequent use of funding can greatly improve “construction” outcomes.
Actively performing routine and capital maintenance to facilities and other forms of physical infrastructure need not be a challenge. The activities and practices adopted, however, determine ultimate success or failure.
Internal staffing and management capabilities are step one. Qualified and sufficient staff and staffing policies to maintain and operate facilities may seem an obvious requirement. That said, competency levels with respect to technical as well as leadership and other management skills remains a major issue. An operation manual or an execution guide is “must have”. It is a “living document” that incudes written job descriptions and qualifications for all internal and external staff as well as associated metrics and deliverables. Associated training must be mandatory and also ongoing.
All decisions are information driven, based upon pre-determined criteria. Information must be current and actionable. Represented using common, standard terms and in plain English.
The “construction delivery method” is the single most important item in setting the overall tone, working relationships, and expectations, as well as eventual success or failure.
Regularly scheduled repair, renovation, and maintenance maximizes the useful life of a facility, building system, or other structure, if correctly prioritized and implemented. Accomplishing the latter requires that structures have an established baseline for minimum baseline performance and condition, a robust method for collecting information in a standardized manner, a decision-support methodology, and an efficient execution / project delivery framework.
Facilities condition assessments and associated work order systems play their respective roles in helping to prioritize work, and subsequent scheduling. Neither, however, address the efficient execution of the numerous renovation, repair, maintenance, and minor new construction projects facing real property portfolio owners. Arguably the latter can ONLY be accomplished via the consideration and implementation of LEAN collaborative construction delivery methodologies.
In-house personnel certainly address execution of projects up to a certain size; however, most repair and renovation projects require leveraging external service providers. Traditional design-bid-build and even design-build are inefficient meeting these needs. Both require longer timelines, and neither assure 90%+ on-time, on-budget, and satisfactory delivery.
Job Order Contracting, JOC, or more specifically, OpenJOCTM Job Order Contracting, provide a proven framework to help owners operate buildings as they were intended, in a cost-effective manner, and execute projects addressing the highest needs.
OpenJOC Job Order Contracting includes key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the dollars and percentage dollars spent on buildings/grounds renovation repair, and associated time line and other predetermined metrics.
OpenJOC Job Order Contracting is tailor for owner needs, however, at a minimum generally includes…
- Locally researched detailed line item construction cost data organized using CSI MasterFormat
- Standardized LEAN processes, workflows, documents, a communication
- A common methodology for creating, sharing, editing, storing and retrieving information
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Mandatory initial and ongoing training for all participants
- Best value procurement
- Shared risk/reward for owners and construction contractors
- Regular independent audits
- Enabling cloud-based technology
- Owner supplied technical specifications
- Compliance with Federal/County/State/Local requirements