Keeping a hotel's fixed opening date safe on a site with no room to breathe

The challenge

The client had set a fixed, tight opening date, with no built-in room to absorb delays. The site itself made that harder: a tight three-cornered plot in the city with no space to store material, so everything delivered had to go straight into place.

Collaborative, visual planning was already running, with weekly on-site meetings involving all contracting partners. The prefab structure was sequenced in continuous flow, zone by zone, sometimes two floors at once. Despite that, the team started seeing deviations between planned and actual progress on the main structure. The cause traced back to one specific misalignment: what the site needed and when didn't match what the prefab supplier was actually producing and delivering.

Where we focused

Because the prefab supplier was at the source of the misalignment, they were brought directly to the table, together with the project manager, site leader and engineers, to work through options as a team rather than as a dispute to resolve after the fact. What came out of that was then set in stone through Last Planner System practices — commitments the whole group had agreed to, not instructions handed down.

The team extended the collaborative planning already in place to govern prefab deliveries directly, combined with micro-zoning: breaking the structure into small, sequenced zones so each delivery could be tied precisely to the piece of work it was meant for, rather than to a general area of the site. Every delivery was planned six weeks ahead, piece by piece, with a precise date and time — because with no on-site storage, execution planning and delivery planning had to be the same plan, not two plans kept in sync.

The site's physical constraint shaped the plan itself: one crane, one truck on site at a time, which capped deliveries at four to six prefab pieces a day depending on load size. That constraint was made visible directly on the collaborative planning, so scheduling was optimised around what the site could actually absorb.

Once the six-week delivery plan was set, delivery needs and priorities were shared with engineers and the prefab supplier on a collaborative platform, with information released according to actual process lead times. Any team member could see the real-time status of each piece of prefab — ordered, validated by engineers, validated by the site leader, delivered — from anywhere, keeping the full delivery chain under control.

What changed

• Structural work returned to a steady rhythm of three weeks per level, replacing the deviations that had put the schedule at risk.

• Every piece of prefab had a known status, visible to the whole team in real time, replacing guesswork about what was coming and when.

• The crane and single-delivery-at-a-time constraint stopped being a bottleneck the team discovered daily and became a known input the plan was built around.

• The hotel opened on schedule, on the fixed date the client had set from the start.

• The developer took enough interest in how the planning was managed to visit the site specifically to see it — treating it as a learning for their own future projects.