Logistics Distribution Centre
Tight programme delivered through pull planning and a disciplined three-week look-ahead. PPC averaged 84% from week six.
- Value
- $54M
- Duration
- 14 months
- Outcome
- On budget, on time
- PPC ≥ 80% by week 6
- Make-ready closed 95% of constraints
- Zero cumulative change > 3%
- Pull planning works on shed projects, not just complex ones
- Make-ready is the highest-leverage meeting in the week
- Hold change control even on simple jobs
Project context
A 48,000 m² logistics distribution centre on a greenfield industrial estate in regional Australia, comprising a tilt-up concrete shell, 12 metres to underside of steel, 40 dock doors, a fully racked mezzanine fit-out and a dedicated truck marshalling yard. The client was a third-party logistics operator with a contractual tenant move-in date 14 months after site possession, driven by an existing lease expiry that could not be extended. Contract was a guaranteed maximum price design-and-construct with a Tier-2 contractor. Total contract value AUD 78 million (approximately USD 54 million). The project had three things going for it from the start: a single client decision-maker, a near-rectangular site with no neighbours, and a design that had been built three times before by the same contractor on similar sites. It used those advantages by running a disciplined lean programme rather than coasting on them.
Why pull planning was used on a simple job
Pull planning is usually associated with complex programmes — hospitals, towers, infrastructure. The conventional wisdom is that on a simple shed project the schedule is obvious enough that the formal pull-planning workshop is overkill. This project tested that assumption and found it wrong. The team ran a two-day pull-planning workshop in week three with all major trades — concrete, structural steel, roofing, cladding, mechanical, electrical, fire and racking. The workshop produced a phase plan that was 11 days shorter than the planner's original critical-path schedule, because the trades themselves identified opportunities to overlap that the planner had treated as sequential. The cost of the workshop was approximately AUD 18,000 in trade time. The schedule saving was worth approximately AUD 240,000 in prelims. The lesson is that pull planning is not about complexity — it is about getting the trades to commit to a sequence they actually believe.
The three-week look-ahead and the make-ready meeting
From week four to substantial completion, the team ran a 45-minute make-ready meeting every Thursday morning. The agenda was fixed: for every activity in the next three weeks, the team confirmed whether the seven constraints (information, materials, equipment, labour, prerequisite work, external conditions, contract) were clear. Any constraint not clear was assigned an owner and a closure date. The meeting closed an average of 18 constraints per week. PPC (Percent Plan Complete) — the percentage of weekly committed activities that were actually completed — averaged 84% from week six to substantial completion, against an industry benchmark of 50–60%. The single biggest contributor to the high PPC was the make-ready discipline. Activities that had open constraints were removed from the weekly commitment rather than carried over hopefully. That is the entire trick.
Change control on a simple job
The temptation on a GMP shed project is to handle small changes informally — a verbal agreement, a marked-up sketch, a handshake. The cumulative cost of informal change on a 14-month programme is consistently underestimated. This project enforced full change control from day one: every change above AUD 5,000 went through a written variation request with a cost and schedule impact, signed by the client representative within five business days. The variation log closed the project with 64 items, total value AUD 1.8 million, all signed and paid without dispute. The total cumulative change was 2.3% of contract value. On comparable projects without strict change control, cumulative change is typically 6–9% on this type of work. The lesson is that change control is cheap insurance — it costs an hour per change and saves the final-account dispute that lasts six months.
Delivery and handover
Substantial completion was achieved one day ahead of the contractual date with a snag list of 142 items, all closed within 21 days. The tenant moved in on the day the existing lease expired. The final account was settled within 60 days of practical completion with no disputed items. The GMP was returned to the client at 99.7% — the contractor took a 0.3% pain share on a minor concrete remediation in the truck yard. There was no claim, no extension of time application, and no LD discussion. The project is not interesting because it was hard. It is interesting because it was simple and the team treated it with the same discipline as a hard project.
What this project says about simple jobs
The biggest risk on a simple project is complacency. The team has done it three times before, the design is repeatable, the trades know each other — and the temptation is to coast. The projects that finish two months late and 8% over on this type of work are almost always the ones where the contractor relied on familiarity instead of discipline. The disciplines that work on hard projects work on easy ones too: pull planning, make-ready, change control, weekly PPC. They cost the same and they deliver the same. The only difference is that on an easy project they buy margin instead of buying recovery.