Space is a construction resource not to be overlooked during project scheduling, production planning, and control. When space use over time is not planned, trades may get stacked in areas of the jobsite that are labor intensive, which may hamper productivity and cause safety concerns. Augmenting traditional scheduling representations, spatiotemporal modeling in construction considers both space and time to depict ongoing construction work. This paper presents a simple space scheduling program called LoSite that helps workers involved in doing the work visualize the work schedule, facilitates production control, and fosters transparency in daily coordination of work space among trades. LoSite was implemented in Microsoft Excel. The researchers prototyped, deployed, and tested the space scheduling program to visualize construction work being done during the interiors phase of an open-space office building. Successes of the program as well as limitations to its full adoption by the team are discussed in this paper. LoSite delivers proof-of-concept that spaceuse visualization, even on a large-scale project, can be accomplished effectively using software that is readily available and familiar to many people.
The discipline of Facility Management (FM) emerged in the 1970s triggered by the concomitance of (1) increasing complexity in the workplace and (2) understanding of an interdependence between users' behaviors and building design. Despite the existence of FM, a number of buildings today still fail to deliver value during the occupation phase. Although various causes contribute to such failures, this paper focuses on the lack of strategic involvement of Facilities Managers (FMs) in design. It uses the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as a case study to describe how an organization has-in the course of its Lean journey-learned the importance, not only of considering FM requirements during design, but more importantly of actively engaging FMs early in the design process. Benefits experienced by UCSF are multiple. One is that FMs understand, perhaps better than designers, the complexity of the programs housed by UCSF buildings and the constraints this complexity imposes on the design requirements. This helps FMs advise on trade-offs between their preferences for simple (e.g., easy-to-maintain) systems and the programs' needs for complex systems.
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