Pull Scheduling Lessons from a Paper Machine Rebuild, Paul Reiser
September 23rd, 2005 by Hal[Notes from LCI's 7th Annual Lean Construction Congress]
"(Lean transformation) doesn't always look pretty!"
Paul Reiser, VP The Boldt Company, is one of the leaders and contributors to the development and practice of lean construction. He has been splitting his time between hospital projects and paper mill projects. The Boldt Company has been growing steadily and diversifying along the way. Pulp and paper investment has declined substantially in the last 10 years. Boldt's business has shifted from 70% of their work to 10%. They started using LPS on building projects in 1999. The paper rebuild clients thought they already do it. LPS didn't take. The fragmented contracting of specialized labor got in their way. The pulp and paper industry uses CPM schedules to capture and roll up individual trade planning. Productivity was tracked using earned value. For the most part things went well.
Three factors changed the situation for lean:
- Companies are more concerned about opportunity costs of outages. Paper machines make between $21,000 and $42,000 of profit/day. A 30-day outage can mean a loss of $1 million profit.
- Availability of a web-based tool for LPS.
- Helping Hands agreement with the trades.
Early initiative confirmed the opportunity. The stage was set for more collaboration and eliminating barriers between the trades.
Demo and rebuild was planned for 10.5 days working 2 shifts 24 hours/day. Boldt created a teaming agreement among the main contractors that said they would share the all the risks, labor, and no back charges.
Boldt was invited late to the project. The project had a typical push CPM schedule. They went ahead anyway. Dumped the CPM schedule into LeanStream. They didn't have the appropriate level of participation or knowledge for leadership. They used their daily planning sessions to update their commitments. They tried to accomplish too much into a 15 minute meeting. PPC trended downwards. People over committed. Work shouldn't have been on the plan. Due to a surprise with some foundation work they got 4 shifts behind in the first few days. This created the opportunity to use a pull planning approach to replan the start-up with only 8 days left in the project. Following this session PPC trended towards 100% PPC. The owner was impressed with the recovery and asked for an improved planning process for the next machine rebuild. The nature of lean transformation is it's not real comfortable at first. It doesn't always look pretty.
The second project was done with more traditional LPS approaches.
- Sequenced the work aided by 3D modeling
- Did a multI disciplinary pull schedule
- On the floor updates of commitments
- Focus on commitments at shift change
The team finished two days earlier than the fastest a machine of this type had ever been rebuilt.
What's next? 5S for the projects. The underlying operating system must be changed. Lean provides that basis for that change.
Audience Understood Key Points
- Engaged the unions for buy-in and participation
- Were able to recover the delays with the use of lean tools
- Can't dump CPM into lean scheduling
- Setting the bar and setting the process to meet it
- Even a less than well-working LPS still produced better results
- Ability to use LPS to adapt to the unexpected
- Sr Planner finally became a convert that CPM was only good for strategic planning
- Break down provides the opportunity for break through
- Have realistic implementation expectations. Let the team learn and fail.
- Impressed by the leadership of Paul Reiser
- Integrated agreement for resources, risks, and rewards
- Startling that the GC didn't backcharge the subs for what subs should be doing anyway
Questions
- What kind of integrated agreement was it?
- Why did you use 3D modeling in sequencing and strategy?
- How did you select subcontractors?
- Tell us more about LeanStream?
- What was the negotiating strategy to get the unions to work together?
- How are you applying lean back office?
Paul's Closing Comments
It was too much of an effort to use 3D for sequencing. We have more to learn.
LeanStream is SPS's tool for supporting LPS.
We used our standard subcontract form but we appended it with a teaming agreement. We used it to get specific about the behaviors we wanted to see on the project.
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September 25th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
My experience with nearly 20 paper machine rebuilds has convinced me that most paper machines have overly complicated wet ends. Depending upon the era in which the machine was built, they either have overly complicated automatic control schemes, unnecessary tanks and chests, or complicated and poorly performing pipe designs.
A careful review of the wet end can eliminate a lot of unnecessary “stuff” and greatly simplify the rebuild. This also improves operating performance during and after startup.