By Craig Brown & Joseph Schultz

Labor availability. Incomplete and uncoordinated drawings. Long lead times. Tight sites. While different, all projects come with their own set of challenges, bringing with them opportunities for creative solutions. At times, those solutions are specific to the project at hand, but others have the potential to change the construction industry and the way we build. That’s what we see with advanced work packaging—it has the ability to change the construction industry and the mindset of the teams that design and build together.

Driven by the stressed labor market and the need to produce more work with less, advanced work packaging takes design down to the extreme level of detail to eliminate mistakes, improve quality, enhance safety, save time, and increase efficiency through repeatability. The beauty of it is in its flexibility, as it works for a small number of designs on a mass scale, but it also works for mass designs on a small scale, like the packages our team is currently developing and executing for multiple serial builders. “Historically, advanced work packaging hasn’t been done on a smaller scale, but we see the value it brings by facilitating off-site manufacturing and fabrication and ultimately streamlining onsite construction” said Chris Teddy, Vice President at JE Dunn.

Keeping it Predictable
Using a BIM model to a level of development (LOD 500) suited for fabrication based off designer drawings and with off-site manufacturing in mind, as the contractor, we can drill down and create work packages specific to each element of the project.

Work packaging is a hybrid of planning, prefabrication, and modular components at a higher level of detail and much larger scale. More than anything, it is about making work predictable. By breaking project scopes into smaller executable packages, we are able to reduce the amount of build-up of work-in-process that can have compounded results for a project’s execution of both schedule and cost. With these executable packages, what we know as project controls shifts to a project production management style of execution. Project production management provides an added focus on variability, and inventory.