2nd Annual Technical Conference
Held 24 July 2024
The Project Production Institute held its 2nd annual Technical Conference virtually on 24 July 2024.
The primary objective of the conference is to discuss and address the root cause of major capital project cost and schedule overruns via research, discussion and dissemination of Project Production Management (PPM) and its foundation of Operations Science. This conference will advance research, education, knowledge and practical application of PPM through the presentation of papers and exchange of ideas between industry and academia.
In support of this, PPI invites practitioners and academics to submit technical abstracts for consideration and presentation at the upcoming conference. To participate, please submit an abstract that focuses on one of the following research categories: Theory (specifically related to Operations Science), Model (the application of simulations, digital twins, robotics, autonomous, IoT, AI / ML) or Control (the use of various systems, protocols, methods and tools that are used to control Project Production Systems).
Learn more about PPI’s research here.
Presentations
Five (Not So Obvious) Warning Signs Your Capital Project Is In Trouble
While many obvious warning signs exist on projects that point to an unhealthy state of being – in jeopardy of not meeting business, cost, schedule, quality and safety objectives, there exist other red flags that are not as obvious and often overlooked by project teams. Among these, five standout: 1) Re-baselining, 2) Asking Superficial Questions to Determine Project Health, 3) More Will Fix It Approach, 4) We Have Plenty of Time, and 5) We Keep Doing the Same Thing (And Expecting Different Resul...
Sharpening the Focus on Flow During Weekly Planning Conversations
Collaborative Flow
Good hand-offs from one performer to the next have always been an important part of the Last Planner System® (LPS). LPS features a rigorous process for making reliable commitments and the Percent Plan Complete (PPC) metric to measure how many were done as promised. LPS and PPC have helped reduce waste and frustration in countless weekly planning meetings and represent a major step forward in how we think about work on projects. Reliable commitments and PPC, however, focus primarily on the upstre...
Leveraging AI for Language Analytics in Daily Planning Conversations: A Novel Approach to Enhance Project Success
FactorLab
Effective communication and coordination during daily planning meetings are crucial for successful project execution and fostering a robust safety culture in the construction industry. However, conventional project management approaches, rooted in what the Project Production Institute (PPI) identifies as Era 1 and Era 2 thinking, have significant gaps that prevent the satisfactory management and execution of today’s complex and dynamic capital projects. This paper presents a novel approach that ...
Managing Project Schedule Contingencies Based on Project Production Data from Bottleneck Resource
Texas A&M University
Texas A&M University
As a project progresses throughout its lifecycle, it is important for the project team to learn from prior completed activities in the system. This can be used to adjust the remaining contingency for the project. In this paper, this situation is modelled using Erlang Distribution. Using Bayes’ Law, the associated cost for the remaining work packages is adjusted and fit to the required confidence based on the updated arrival rates of the bottleneck resource.
How to Layout Plants & Shops in Support of Industrialized Construction
Built To Fail
To meet the demand for infrastructure created by digital transformation, energy transition, and the need for commercial and residential space, owners and their contractors continue to move work offsite. From hospital modules to small modular reactors (SMR’s), the thinking is that construction can be made like manufacturing where safer, more productive work environments reduce the cost and time of project delivery. However, for many, the benefit of an offsite strategy remains elusive. If the prom...
More Robust, Insightful And Faster Production Modeling Through The Integration Of Discrete Event Simulation With Analytical Modeling
Project Production Institute
To deliver projects predictably, organizations rely on the use of schedules and various techniques to create and visualize them, including Critical Path Method (CPM), Gantt charts, and physical/virtual “stickie note” plans to name a few. Schedules may be created either by highly skilled schedulers or through collaboration with input from various project participants. To make schedules more robust including better predicting the implications of variability and determining how much contingency to ...
Match Supply with Demand: A Case Study Implementing Production System Optimization (PSO) for Offsite Construction
Stanford University
Stanford University
The adoption of offsite construction methods presents a forward-thinking solution to critical challenges such as stagnant productivity rates, widespread housing shortages, skilled labor shortages, and increasing carbon emissions. However, moving the production location from onsite to offsite makes management a more complex task, resulting in offsite construction projects not achieving the time and cost targets. For instance, we observed that an offsite production factory incurred unnecessary hig...
The Unintended Consequences of Excessive Inventory on Capital Projects
Strategic Project Solutions, Inc.
Capital project owners and service providers may be blind to the fact that working with excessive amounts of inventory contributes to longer schedules, cost overruns and impact to cash flow, which negatively affects return on investment. On the other hand, not enough inventory and the project will not achieve the required throughput while also compromising cost and schedule targets. So, in the spectrum of too much and too little, is there an optimal point? What are the drivers of this optimal po...
For any questions or for more information about the conference, reach out to Kristin Buettner.
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Past Technical Conferences
PPI's 1st Annual Technical Conference was held virtually in July 2023.
