For several years, construction managers have faced issues related to pace control, and the industry acknowledges that weak general construction planning processes are often at the heart of the problem of rising construction costs – something Allie aims to address. Unrealistic scheduling is the most common factor causing project delays.

Worldwide, there is increasing pressure on the construction industry to build more productively and efficiently, especially in essential sectors such as housing. The use of agile digital technologies and processes is now recognized by governments as crucial to enabling construction processes, including construction planning, to become more productive and efficient. The question is how to do this in the best way in each construction management process, including construction planning.

Developing the equivalent of balanced line techniques, pioneered in the manufacturing sector, for the construction sector is a path we believe is worth exploring. This technique suggests a deeper consideration of pace and ways to control it to overcome current construction challenges affecting many construction sectors, including high-rise residential buildings.

The beauty of pace control

The control of a construction planning process’s pace critically impacts project performance in three main ways:

1. Allows an immediate response to a pace anomaly to be made, avoiding potential delays and bottlenecks through continuous monitoring.
2. Facilitates on-demand performance integrity checks by comparing the pace of different business activities to industry standards.
3. Enables more efficient and accurate replanning based on the current project pace.

1 – Continuous pace monitoring

In most standard construction programs, many work packages are planned to last for weeks. With this planning granularity, if you only measure each activity at its end date, you will lose precious time. Moreover, project replanning methods using analog and discontinuous processes do not allow you to continuously update a program as construction progresses. Such processes are exacerbated by unrealistic resource modeling, invariably based on worker availability. Planners may often assume that a resource day on-site is entirely focused on construction work. This inaccurate assumption becomes a real issue with a delay in progress.

Imagine plumbing installation planned to take 2 weeks per floor. Continuous pace monitoring would allow you to realize much earlier in the construction process if, based on the current pace, it wouldn’t finish on time or would finish too early, triggering a chain reaction and leaving workers unnecessarily idle.

Being able to continuously monitor pace and see if a specific activity or another is underperforming or overperforming, so that an overall construction schedule stays on track, is crucial. Delays need to be questioned as they occur, mitigation measures implemented earlier, and pace rates compared and adjusted as needed.

2 – On-demand performance integrity checks

Common causes of gaps in construction planning processes are supply problems, use of unskilled labor, or complex projects. In many cases, these issues can be addressed through on-demand performance integrity checks, available at any time, reducing costs and avoiding delays.

Let’s assume the industry standard rate for carpentry is to deliver 10 units per day, and you are delivering only 5. Besides the fact that not delivering the required carpentry at that pace will cost more, it also indicates a deeper issue in how you handle the carpentry process within your overall program.

Having the means to perform a performance integrity check on the construction process of any trade, as needed, is valuable. It can reveal the progress of the work and possible deviations from initial schedules and potential repercussions at any time during construction.

3 – Accurate rescheduling based on updated data

Nothing goes as planned in construction, as we well know, and this can be caused by the project’s complexity and the large number of unknowns. A planner’s job is to track program deviations and quickly build a mitigation plan to deliver a project as scheduled with minimal disruption or additional costs. Rescheduling is also unproductive and inefficient without accurate data, as you have to work according to intuition or spend time collecting data.

Without updated construction pace data, how can you realize that the reason for any delay is, let’s say, a repeated 1-day delay in floor facilities, or how can you realize that there are 2 unused days between some activities?

Deploying continuous digital data collection would allow you to efficiently update a project schedule more frequently, providing a higher level of certainty for all involved.

Meeting pace-related needs

Continuous pace monitoring, on-demand integrity checks, and accurate scheduling can inform construction planners about potential future risks, including systematic delays, through precise control of possible alternative scenarios.

The ability of construction planners to measure, analyze, and accurately predict completion times based on the current pace and to easily adjust project schedules after any changes is now a basic requirement.

Meeting these pace-related needs is our goal at Allie. Until recently, pace control was an impossible task, but today, with our revolutionary technology, it is feasible: continuous pace monitoring is achieved through 360-degree reality capture technology, on-demand health checks possible through the comparison of real versus planned progress information panels, and scheduling and rescheduling of digitized activities made more accurate and data-driven.