Join us for a Congress Preview as two local teams share their presentations prior to LCI Congress in October.
15 Years of Supercharging: Akron Children’s Hospital’s Newest Emergency Department
Fifteen years into their Lean Journey, Akron Children’s Hospital is celebrating the grand opening of the Mahoning Valley Emergency Department, located on the Beeghly Campus in Boardman, Ohio. 2023 marks 11 years of utilizing lean integrated project delivery (IPD) and is the fifth successful IPD project delivered by the hospital. This project was originally envisioned to replace the outdated and physically fragmented department. The 30,000 square foot addition plus a 16,000 square foot renovation was valued at a $35.7m market cost. The target cost was set at $30.4m.
In early 2020, a new integrated team including local design, construction, and trade partners was formed to tackle this $5.3m challenge, just as the COVID 19 pandemic was spreading throughout the world. Despite multiple challenges, the project was delivered on time, under budget utilizing target value design. Lean integrated project delivery allowed the team to remain flexible and adapt to changing regulations, market conditions, supply chain and other challenges.
The team achieved a majority of the success metrics points, cost savings below target cost, and a fully-funded incentive compensation layer. Challenges that were encountered at key points in the process included challenging owner standards, addressing scope gaps, and balancing trade partner’s work with contractor bid work.
The Power of 360 Digital Workflow: Supercharging Design and Construction Coordination
Traditional design and construction coordination results in lost time during every handoff, increasing potential for errors and rework and affecting safety, cost, quality, and schedule. The 360 Digital Workflow enhances design-build coordination through a six-step process that includes an integrated Building Information Model, pull/takt planning, clash coordination, overlaying digital models onto the job site, verifying field installation, and conducting extremely precise QA/QC inspection. This process coordinates the design into smaller batches/constructible steps to optimize project flow and eliminate design and site discrepancies.
The 360 Digital Workflow uses Lean best practices to optimize the project schedule, resulting in better prefabrication opportunities, increased quality, and minimal rework. This process helped the team achieve accuracy above 99.5% on 23,000 concrete-embedded mechanical, electrical, and plumbing hangers and sleeves, correlating to $400,000 in savings compared to a typical design and construction process. Initially, stakeholders needed convincing; however, by reinforcing a culture of respect and Lean education, including Last Planner System® and Scrum, the team adopted the 360 Digital Workflow and a Plan-Do-Check-Act mindset to improve processes. The process creates value by optimizing the project schedule from design, coordination, placement, and QA/QC. The scalable solution makes assessing and implementing even in small projects easy.