Recognizing Lean Project Pioneering Efforts in Canada
In 2008 the Churchill Northern Studies Centre was excited to announce the design and planning of a $15 million facility upgrade is underway. “Integrated Designs Inc., a Saskatoon-based company with an office in Winnipeg, has been hired to coordinate design and to provide comprehensive project management for the duration of the redevelopment.”
“We’re excited to take on the role of project managers for the CNSC and partner with an organization that is equally excited about developing a high-performance, practical, sustainable building project and utilize a lean and more integrated team based approach to delivering projects in Canada” says Murray Guy, founder of IDI a firm pioneering Integrated Project Delivery in Canada.
After reading the book “Broken Building Busted Budgets” our sponsor Michael Goodyear and the Executive team agreed to try the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach based upon the fact that it creates better value, delivers projects at less cost and risk. It also helped to meet the challenging Infrastructure Funding spending requirements.
IPD works because it brings together people, systems, and business practices into a process that harnesses the talents and insights of all participants. The process increases value to the Centre, by reducing waste and creating efficiency in work flow. One of the top priorities for this project was also to achieve extremely low operating costs as the CNSC needs to cover operating costs as no additional funds are available.
GREEN Project Highlights
LEED Gold Certification, with a low energy design for Northern Climates
Working with an organization committed to a sustainable Northern Research Facility.
Development of a sustainable infrastructure that included composting toilets, sanitary waste treatment, water treatment and grey water systems.
Implementation of a ‘nega’ watts strategy to minimize building loads. The project operating costs needed to be extremely low as no extra funding available
High owner involvement in commissioning to reduce costs and improve capabilities of operating staff.
Project was winner of 2011 Award of Excellence from Manitoba Professional Engineers.
With all of the contractors on board at the beginning of the project we were able to plan for early construction to meet cash flow spending requirements, knowing that we had more confidence in the budget numbers with real time pricing by the people going to be delivering the work. It is much better to incorporate value management into the design as opposed to trying to redesign when projects go over budget.
LEAN Project Highlights
A Collaborative Engagement process was used to clearly the TARGET
Full adoption of Lean Project Delivery process at the start of the project. (Contractor was not comfortable with new contracts so we utilized a modified version of CCDC2)
Target Value Design was successful as there was no additional funding. This needed to be a highly Collaborative effort as it involved a large stakeholder group
Development of a sustainable infrastructure that included composting toilets, sanitary waste treatment, water treatment and grey water systems
High owner involvement in commissioning to reduce costs, achieve low energy performance and improve the capabilities of operating staff
Silver the Bear Guard Dog, working for Board and Room
Prefab components such as Glulam enabled for fast assembly which is especially beneficial in far northern communities with extreme weather conditions and a high cost of construction
Our team was successful in delivering one of North Americas most energy efficient and sustainable Northern Research facilities. This project would not have been possible without adopting a collaborative team based approach. This blog article is dedicated to Michael Goodyear, CNSC and all other pioneers that were willing to explore new approaches and enact the changes needed to fix the building industry.
mguy@i-designs.ca
