CONSTRAINT MANAGEMENT AND

PRODUCTION PLANNING – A CASE STUDY

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ABSTRACT
Constraints are an essential aspect of the Last Planner® System of production planning. As
part of the look-ahead planning, Last Planner System (LPS) defines that Constraints must be
mapped well in advance that can hinder the execution of the work on-site. With the fore
sighting of these constraints, the teams get adequate time to resolve them. Only constraint-free
activities are then included in the production week for execution. While in theory, the process
is straightforward, the execution on projects is rarely streamlined, with conventional constraint
mapping tools operating in silos, completely devoid of collaborative planning.
Conventional methods of constraint management have proven drawbacks with respect to
their documentation and integration with the production planning. Further, their impact on the
master plan is rarely integrated to provide adequate insight into the achievement of key
milestones. While different organizations practicing Lean adopt different methods in dealing
with constraints, there exists a universal gap in constraint management through disparate
platforms and multiple sources of updates.
This paper will adopt the case study approach to highlighting the conventional methods of
constraint management on an infrastructure project, with a key focus on highlighting the
challenges observed by the project team. Following that, the research will elaborate on the
transformation of the process using a digital tool developed on Lean workflows, which has
helped improve the constraint mapping, assignment, and tracking, as well as providing real-
time updates linked to the production planning and monitoring.
The paper will conclude with the key aspects of this production control system for efficient
constraint management, and the factors that played a crucial role in enabling the adoption of
the new system amongst the project teams.

KEYWORDS
Lean construction, Constraint, Constraint Management, Last Planner System.

INTRODUCTION
Lean Construction is fundamentally developed on three views in production theory,
Transformation, Flow and Value (TFV) (Koskela, 2000). All systems that pursue the TFV
goals are in a way lean system, with the core idea being - elimination of every kind of waste
within the production process for ensuring smooth workflow. One of the critical factors to
achieving this is early identification, realisation and elimination of constraints and variances
(Ballard,2000).
The Last Planner System (LPS) has proven track record of being rather effective to make
the production process lean despite having variability. The term “last planner” refers to the
individuals in the team responsible for making the final assignment of work to specific

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performers and ensuring they have the materials, equipment, space, design, and information
available to complete their assignments.
Constraints in the Production control and workflow control in Last planner system
(Ballard,2000) are one of the prominent root causes or reasons for the failure of a weekly work
plans. One of the critical parameters of a successful completion of a weekly work plan is the
compliance of all the prerequisites and availability of required resources. Constraint analysis
is an essential part of LPS® that is applied as a proactive way to map and solve potential
problems as a team. Infect, proactive constraint identification and removal is teamwork and a
continuous process throughout the production management. The key is to ensure ownership of
the constraint so the responsible actor can take necessary actions to clear the constraints and
comply to the prerequisites. Accordingly, to understand the notion of constraints, Theory of
Constraints (TOC) has been explored. The concept of the TOC can be summarised as: Every
system must have at least one constraint. If it were not true, then a real system such as a profit-
making organisation would make limitless profit. A constraint, therefore, “is anything that
limits a system from achieving higher performance versus its goal” (Goldratt, 1988, p. 453).
The amalgamation of schedules and constraints, from a point of view of production
planning, is a significant yet a complex process for any project teams (Lau, E., & Kong, J. J.
2006). The amount of time and effort required by project teams, to keep the process active is
found to be a major barrier in the successful implementation of this approach (Ballard, 2008).
Therefore, there is an evident need for a production management system which can drive
the production planning along with proactive constraint mapping for projects. A Lean tool
developed on the Last Planner® System for collaborative planning can potentially help drive
the process, while providing an environment that can host discussions, make-ready process,
and finally, production control to help teams steer the successful production.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Koskela (2000) has done extensive work in defining the theory of production, driven by three
different conceptualisations: Transformation, Flow, and Value theories define the critical
aspects of a successful production management model (Koskela, 2000). While Transformation
helps breakdown the scope in a structured manner, the concept of Flow stems from the making
the transformation more efficient by minimising wastes in the process and reducing cycle time.
The goal is to reduce variability through a commitment-based approach, thereby balancing the
push and pull between the release of work and the ability of the team to execute it realistically
onsite (Koskela, 1999).
It is important to note that production control is different from project control; while the
latter is driven by replanning when the execution varies, the former is driven by an approach
to planning right by ensuring the right flow of information and the ultimate goal of generating
value for the teams (Ballard, 2000). The difference in these approaches ties closely to the
concept of push and pull in production. With high variability in in the production flows, it is
important to adopt an approach of clearing the preconditions for a construction task, i.e.,
Construction Design, Components and Materials, Workers, Equipment, Space, Connecting
works, and External Conditions (Koskela, 1999).
With a clear focus on reducing variability and driving a commitment-based approach to
production planning, LPS is known to be the first and most famous Lean tool adopted by the
construction industry (Dave et al. 2015). The Last Planner System was developed in 1992 by
the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) (Ballard, 1993). LCI presents LPS® as a production
system created to produce predictable workflow and fast learning in programming, projecting,
construction, performance documentation and the handover of projects. LPS and lean
construction was developed in the wake of lean, inspired by Toyota, which first was developed
for manufacturing (Ballard, 2000). Pull as a production logistical principle is central to lean
manufacturing and is often associated with just-in-time production. With a focus on look-ahead
planning, LPS defines what should be done in the upcoming weeks of the project. A critical
aspect of this process is constraint mapping while pulling work between the trades to ensure
activities are ready for production, and handovers between trades can then be made efficient
and value-driven (Ballard, 2000). To keep prerequisites and constraints in check, the Last
Planner® System has a mandatory process called make-ready process.
There have been a variety of studies on the concepts of constraint management and
production management. The roots of constraint management are dated back with the
development of a production scheduling software known as Optimized Production Technology
(OPT) in the late 1970s (Zeynep Tuğçe Şimşit et al., 2014). Since then, constraint management
has evolved from a manufacturing scheduling method to a management philosophy that can be
used to understand and improve the performance of complex constructions.
Bhargav et al. (2015) discuss the shortcomings of LPS that emerge as major barriers of
application of the system overall. Weekly planning was the widely applied aspect of LPS, while
lookahead planning, constraint analysis and continuous improvement were a major challenge
across the case studies undertaken. Only two out of the five projects analysed constraints in the
implementation of LPS. Lack of information management processes in tracking the root causes
for plan failure is highlighted to effectively apply the Last planner system.
Learnings with respect to constraint management in the application of Last panner system
in different case studies by (Ballard,2000) states the importance of constraint analysis prior to
the weekly coordination meetings. This is to reduce the time on collecting problem information
rather than discussions on actual problem solving. The study describes the processes adopted
in the project to analyse constraints. Manual processes were set to maintain a constraint analysis
form sent to every subcontractor to fill in for the next lookaheads and make sure to proceed
with the task only when all the constraints are removed. With extensive constraint analysis and
subcontractor participation, the project was able to achieve a PPC of 90% over the period.

RESEARCH PROBLEM
Based on a cursory review, it has been found that the success stories depicted in those
studies bring out the importance of constraint management, as well as the challenges to
implementing it effectively in production planning. However, little is conveyed about the
processes involved in reaching the milestone. A lot of peripheral systems makes it
unnecessarily complicated for the last planners to keep a track of both the production plan as
well as the constraints. Eventually, this adds to confusion during progress review and look-
ahead planning, leading to poor efficiency in the entire process. Worst of all, the poor execution
of a lean approach leads to demotivation amongst project teams for adopting an approach
towards continuous improvement. The paper here explores the success factors of an improved
production planning process through efficient constraint management from the lens of people,
process, and technology, from a design science case study approach. The scope of the study is
limited to an Infrastructure Project and figure out the best ways to improve existing constraint
and production management process with design science approach.

CASE STUDY BRIEFING

To develop the integrated solution, a railway network infrastructure development project in
Norway, (EU) has been taken up as base to conduct design science research excursive. This
infrastructure case study seemed to be best suited for this research, due to the immense number
of constraints hindering the successful completion of the project, and their significant impact
on the project timeline and cost.
The project in reference has partially mature implementation of Lean production
management, driven by a Last Planner® approach for collaboration during their pull planning
sessions. The components involved in implementing the LPS have majorly been achieved
during the Master Scheduling, Phase Scheduling, Lookahead Planning and Commitment
Planning Stage. The difficulty here; is the manual intervention and physical communications
required by the planner to proceed through each step creating hustles and stress to fully
implement the last planner system. The Learning phase also gets skipped as the planners are
time bound and allocating additional hours to gather past data for evaluation is a challenging
act in itself. In the pursuit of achieving excellence in their collaborative planning practices, the
project team participated in the exercise of building the more efficient and advanced constraint
management solution. Accordingly, the production and constraint management processes prior
and post solution deployment were captured and analysed as covered in the following sections.

EXISTING PROCESSES (BEFORE)

The process of production planning starts with creating plan on a scheduling tool called
“Primavera P6” and decimating it through emails. Subsequently the lookahead discussion
sessions are being held having constraints management as core using spreadsheets. The
production plans are usually developed, coordinated, and updated by a dedicated planner in the
project. Here, the mode of communication are emails, phone calls, messages, or face to face
interactions. The discussions may involve any difficulties faced by the last planners, getting
updates related to constraints or activities. The same planner is responsible to update the master
plan of P6 alongside communicating with the constraint owners and authors to update the
progress manually on Excel. The typical routine is estimated consuming minimum of 2 to 3
hours of a planner’s workday for let alone coordinating from site team.
On weekly basis, there are three meetings taking place: Lookahead sessions (3 hrs.-),
Constraint review sessions (1 hr.) and Progress review/support meetings (0.5 to 2 hrs.)
involving the last planners and key project participants.
The lookahead meetings are focused to discuss upcoming 12 weeks of work and their
dependencies, flows, and their make ready needs along with noting down the updates from the
site. The dedicated planner usually captures the discussions to update and align the master plan.
Within this session, the milestones and key deliveries are conveyed to the last planners and
their feedback is taken to build-up the high-level delivery plan. Additionally, the constraints
are also matched with the production plan. Later, the Last planners try to determine the
potential constraints for their deliverables. The planner than collects all the constraints and
compile a spreadsheet to keep a track and do the follow-ups on the listed constraints throughout
the week.
In the weekly constraint review meeting: The last planners and project facilitators provide
further updates on the constraint removal process. Using the same constraints spreadsheet, the
planer updates the subcontractor along with the Minutes of Meetings email for the review
meeting. The update to previous week’s constraints and update to future week’s activities as
well are mailed to respective subcontractors cc’ing the client to update them. The support or
progress review meeting is regularly held to resolve the pending issues during execution or to
address newly reported constraint by the last planners.

KEY OBSERVATIONS IN THE EXISITING PROCESSES:

The constraints are usually mapped with the production deliverables during the lookahead
meetings; however, the production is not restricted by the same. Hence, the last planners can
simply bypass or miss the constraint to rush to the delivery. Primarily because of the production
plan and the constraints are managed in two different systems, this resulted into excessive strain
on the planner and potentially losing the overall control of the production plan. Yet another
key objective that constraints need to serve is to determine the knock-on impact on the
successor works. However, the partially linked system does not allow to analyse the impact
and severity of identified constraints. An example demonstrating the constraint management
using a spreadsheet is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Spreadsheet to manage and track the constraints

For the effective constraint management, it is necessary for the last planners to flag up and
escalate the constraints to the planners/management. On an such infrastructure project, it
becomes difficult to convey these short yet vital information from site to the support team. As
the constraint resolution directly affects the successful completion of task, currently teams need
to collect the information manually on a daily basis to determine the constraints, ultimately
costing them lot of time and efforts. Evidently, due to communication gaps and lags, there have
been instances on site, where the succeeding task workforces arrive at the jobsite despite not
having adequate clearance from the predecessor work. These situations gradually lead to loss
of business and productivity for site teams. On top of workforce, rented machineries also lead
up to an overhead cost just because of delays and gaps in communication channels for
constraint management.
For this project, the work is on-going for almost 21 hours a day. To work during the late-
night hours, a mandatory permission from the government is required. Moreover, even for
applying for the permission, all the machineries are required to satisfy the requirement of
permissible decibel counts that is being produced during the work. This process applies
individually to all work in progress areas of the project. A rapid and effective coordination in
this case becomes extremely critical to stay on top of the dynamics of the production
environment. However, in lot of these instances, the project team had missed the permission
procurement and forced to postpone the work several times. Certainly, the latency in
communication is the root cause of these unwanted delays.
Concisely, the constraint management and related production management is itself being
constrained due to the listed observations and pain points:
• Latency and gap in communication.
• Multiple and distributed communication channels causing unwanted confusions.
• Lack of control over production planning due to high degree of constraints and their
impacts.
• Lot of unnecessary work and effort being poured in the process.
• Greater Standardisation and mistake proofing is needed
• ‘Proactiveness’ and ‘transparency’ from the system is getting restrained.
• Analytics and trends mapping cannot be actively done or executed due to various
manual interventions.
These observations have been responsible for multiple instances, at the time of significant
wastes (motion, overprocessing, waiting) and loss of value in terms of delivery.
DEVELOPING THE INTEGRATED SOLUTION
After the empirical analysis of the as-is process of constraint and production management
system, authors and project team members were set to find an optimal solution to address the
listed observation. The approach to do the same was simply addressing all the listed observation
and figure out the ways to eliminate them.
Starting with the inherent latency in the production process, many of the scholars have
recommended to resort to Real-time production management systems. On top of being
Realtime, the solution must be made centralised to collect all sorts of constraint and related
information within one system. The solution should also be connected to the production
planning to evaluate the impact of those constraints in the production. Moreover, the new
system must support digitalisation and mobility to element the unnecessary human intervention
and let the team communicate freely without any restriction of predefined
engagements/meetings. In fact, the system should be easy enough for ground users to raise their
constraints directly from site, without any restraints or cumbersome processes.

Figure 1 How to data can be transformed into wisdom (Gapingvoid, 2019)

Additionally, the new system should support the standards to collect accurate and rich
details of constraints for improving discrepancies and gaps in communication. Furthermore,
the collected information should have enough categorisation, classifications, and relationships
(connection with production information). This eventually will help project team to transform
their information into knowledge (figure 2) to generate meaningful insights during the
constraint reviews ultimately making the constraint analysis more concurrent.
Considering the listed requirement points, authors started developing a digital constraint
management system which is in sync and integrated with production management system. For
the same authors resorted to VisiLean, a cloud-based production management system which
has all the required capabilities of real-time production management and tracking. Authors then
designed and developed the Digital constraint management solution that is integrated with
VisilLean.

DIGITALLY INTEGRATED PROCESSES (AFTER)

With the newly deployed solutions, the planners are now importing their master level
(Primavera-P6 schedule having activities with an average duration of near to 20 days)
programme in VisiLean making it Realtime, UpToDate and available for all the project
participants online. This resulted in saving significant time and efforts usually spent for
exchanging emails the plans and planning coordination. Now, the subcontractors are using
VisiLean (previously some other tool) to break down the activities into smaller chunks and
allocate the work amongst their team.
Lookahead meetings have now became a review of lookahead activities in real-time with
all the relevant parties involved and UpToDate with their production plans alongside the
applicable prerequisites and constraints. The new process now has the notion of a clear
ownership over the constraint and inbuilt commitment structure to formally commit their work
within the system. Accordingly, the owners of the constraints are directly getting notified
whenever a constraint have been created and assigned.
 Figure 2 Live list for flagged constraints in VisiLean.
The weekly constraint review meetings are now just 15 min constraint removal health check
meeting with the introduction of concurrent constraint management approach. Project planning
team are now spending minimal effort for collecting and processing the data for raised
constraint. During this meeting, the system automatically generates a view where all the
constraints can be seen with their allocations, priorities, statuses, associated tasks, predefined
categories, locations, and attachments for the team to conduct a focused and efficient review
of new, pending or resolved constraints. (Figure 3,4)

Figure 3 Content and properties of constraints.

Following up and communication for the constraint is now possible for the task owners and
authors by enabling constraint specific messaging options. Additionally, with the help of
linkage between the production tasks and constraint, now the tasks cannot be started without
closing the constraints. Consequently, the field team is now more conscious and responsive
towards the constraints associated with their deliverables that were usually being neglected or
skipped until they become a reason for completely stopping their work. Many of critical
constraints related to flow and logistics are now directly being reported from the field using
the mobile apps. In response, the project supporting team is also actively responding to remove
the constraints making sure that the jobsite is ready in advance.
Upon the introduction of new concurrent constraint management solutions, the project
teams are now receiving massive amount of categorical and descriptive data from the last
planners. Furthermore, this data is being analysed to generate trends and insights on flagging
committing and resolving the constraints.
 Figure 4 Constraint being reported from site (phone) and reviewed in the office (Desktop).

DISCUSSION
Starting with the production planning, the complete information management approach has
been transformed with the introduction of Realtime, cloud-based and centralised production
management system. As proposed solution can directly host P6 plan and project participants
are building the production using the same; once uploaded, the planner and managers are more
focusing on facilitating and supporting the last planner instead constantly revising and updating
the plan. Infect, the subcontractors exabits more interest when they have the ability breakdown
of the plans due to the planning freedom they are leveraging. More importantly, keeping the
production schedules and constraints in one system has helped to develop a transparent and
trustful project environment. The project team can now refer to the same production schedules,
and constraints having the assurance that there is only one single source of truth for project.
Comparing the constraint flagging and removal processes, the As-is state had been suffering
with motion, waiting and overprocessing waste due to manual processes and their reliance on
peripheral systems. The implemented Realtime solution has demonstrated significant
improvement in terms of cutting down the time, efforts and latency in the overall constraint
flagging and resolution processes. Using the new solution, the focus of the Lookahead
planning is now shifted more towards addressing the constraint as the users are now flexible to
report the constraint at any point of time with the required target dates. The new approach has
clear notion of ownership and commitment even for the constraints. Anyone who is capable
enough for the resolution, can actually commit to remove any flagged constraint. Infect, the
constraint authors are not required to exchange emails. text messages or call for the updates,
they can simply converse within the constraint using their workstations or mobile devises. This
conversation is also getting richer due to the ability to exchange files, media, notes in Realtime.
Once resolved, the constraint owner can also close the constraint and log the actual completion
date.
The As-is system was evidently struggling with restraining production activities with the
associated pending constraints, and ultimately ended up as wasteful act. However, the new
solution is built on existing production management solution with integrating constraint
information directly with the production deliverables. Accordingly, even starting the
production activities are restricted unless all the constraints are not removed. In case the
production task has any constraint, activity owner can review and take follow-ups on them
directly from their mobile devices or workstations.
During the production weekly status/review meeting, reviewing any open constraints for
any activity becomes simply with the Last Planner view on VisiLean. The Last Planner view
has helped to accelerate the review of forthcoming work and with their constraints (Figure 5).
The production team is leveraging this view to understand the impact that a constraint can have
for the activities and sumbsequcutely on the sucessor tasks.

Figure 5 Last Planner view indicating constraints in VisiLean

With the live dashboards, project participants including the client team have now become well
aware about the the challenges and constraint being experienced by the last planners on site.
At any point of time, this dashboard (Figure 6) shows the live data and updates, making it a
single tool for reviewing the data and eliminating any unncessary, time spent in non-value
adding communications.

Figure 6 Constraint dashboard

CONCLUSIONS
The Last Planner system of production management is one of the most popular lean tools being
deployed in construction companies across the world. Having a last planner system comprising
of the constraint management practically closes all the gaps in the production management
process in construction. The presented casestudy has revieled the painpoints of mannual
constraint management system. However, with the new integrated solution, production
planning and constraint management processes can be hosted on a concurrent collaborative
planning platform breaking through the identified challenges. More specifically, the constraints
are being actively assigned and effectively addressed by the responsible actors. The provided
categorisation & classification of constraint preparties are significantly helping to filter and
process the reported constraints in during and outside the lookahead discussions without any
barriers. Additionally, the collected information from various teams is getting more richer and
more effective for conducting the trend analysis and drafting action plans for continuous
improvement. Moreover, the connection between tasks and constraints are providing
production flow, timeline and ownership related insights for establishing the context, analyse
the impact and priority of the constraint. Consequently, the time dedicated for weekly review
meetings, constraint management meetings, etc have been observed to reduced by almost 3/4
of the time consumed previously.

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