During PPI’s 12th Annual Symposium, in collaboration with Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE), recognized leaders from industry and academia presented how projects are being delivered predictably, safer, faster at lower cost. Attendees gained insights into emerging methodologies and their real-world applications.
Gary Fischer opens the 12th Annual PPI Symposium by framing unprecedented infrastructure investment demands and introducing PPI’s educational programs at Texas A&M and Stanford designed to prepare industry leaders for the coming transformation in construction.
Todd Zabelle challenges the industry’s century-old administrative approach to project delivery, showing how AI is already displacing knowledge work and why the future belongs to those who treat projects as production systems rather than contract management exercises.
Petronas shares five years of PPM implementation results, demonstrating how integrated digital construction solutions, WIP control, and production system thinking have delivered over $400 million in value and transformed project teams into active believers.
Ed McCann traces 30 years of learning that product design and process design are inseparable, showing how research into construction error, material waste, and production system thinking is now shaping projects from Olympic venues to nuclear site factories.
The Boldt Company shares 25 years of lean evolution and recent production system optimization results, demonstrating how self-performing contractors can break schedule constraints, challenge resource assumptions, and bring production engineering into early design phases for faster, cheaper, better project delivery.
The Project Production Institute presents its first-ever dual Technical Achievement Awards to Ed McCann and Will Lichtig, recognizing their exceptional contributions to advancing project production management through industry leadership, lifelong learning, and practical application.
A fourth-generation mechanical contractor explains why moving work offsite isn’t an easy button, sharing hard-won lessons on production system optimization, the limits of transparency with owners, and why modularization decisions require rigorous engineering, not assumptions.
Roberto Arbulu presents five minimum requirements for effective data center supply chains, showing how lead time analysis, transparency systems, redundancy strategies, and production system thinking can close the gap between construction capability and the one-year technology refresh cycle driving demand.
Four industry leaders debate what owners should do differently on data center and infrastructure projects, challenging assumptions about contracts, administrative burden, decision rights, and the fundamental difference between project management and production thinking.
Mark Spearman and James Choo explain the science behind optimal buffering strategy, revealing why OEE metrics can be counterproductive and demonstrating that capacity buffer and variability reduction are mathematically equivalent paths to faster, more predictable project delivery.
Stanford’s Martin Fischer shares how operations science and PPM concepts are being integrated into graduate and professional education, alongside research on design change management and multitask construction robots that directly address the industry’s demand and supply challenges.
Stanford CIFE and Mortenson apply Little’s Law and operations science to the submittal process, revealing that delays on a $1.3 billion project weren’t caused by slow reviewers but by system overload, and showing how AI can enable production control rather than just task automation.
Research from Stanford demonstrates how computer vision and graph neural networks can automatically capture granular production data from construction video footage, enabling real-time detection of workflow interruptions and closing the information gap between field execution and management decisions.
Texas A&M research reframes risk management through production systems, showing how WIP measures exposure to design change risk and how carrying design alternatives creates quantifiable value, while the university’s certification program with PPI teaches professionals to apply these concepts to real projects.
A Texas A&M Next-Gen capstone project applies production system mapping to a chemical plant turnaround, identifying pipe fitter bottlenecks, enabling real-time change analysis, and shortening a four-day shutdown by one day to save nearly $1 million in lost revenue.
Creature, a vertically integrated design-build firm, shares how mapping their production system produced a 23% cycle time reduction, and applying controls to specific phases yielded up to 60% improvements, while extending PPM principles from construction trades to their in-house architecture team.
Gary Fischer closes the 12th Annual PPI Symposium by distilling the day’s common themes: PPM’s impact on speed, the necessity of integrating product and process design, and how production thinking provides a framework that, once seen, permanently changes how you view projects and the world.
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