The Fiatech Celebration of Engineering and Technology Innovation(CETI) Awards recently honored the individuals and companies that have conducted new and emerging technology implementations as well as to individuals who have made significant strides in advancing innovation in research and development in the design, engineering and construction industry. The UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay team won the Scenario-Based Project Planning category for the 878,000-gross-square-foot project, which is serving as an example of applying integrated project delivery processes, tools, and technologies on a public sector project.

The new medical center, scheduled to open in 2015, will include a children's hospital, a cancer hospital, a women's specialty hospital, a rooftop helipad, an outpatient building, and a central plant. The team includes UCSF Medical Center, DPR Construction, Stantec, and key trades. The team began working together nearly 18 months prior to construction start and was able to reduce construction costs by more than $100 million without reducing scope through the integrated virtual design and construction process.

Some of the innovative practices used include:

• Co-location (The Big Room)

More than 100 people from 19 companies were co-located to enhance collaboration and minimize delays in decision-making.

• Cluster teams: Nine cluster teams, with representatives from designers, subcontractors, the owner, and the general contractor on each team, focus on driving costs down and streamlining information flow and decision making.
• Pull and ICE sessions: Pull schedule meetings establish optimal sequences and durations. Integrated concurrent engineering (ICE) sessions solve multi-disciplinary issues quickly with all affected stakeholders approaching an issue and choosing the optimal solution.
• Access to information: ProjectWise, a server-based document management system, is being used to allow for real-time access to the latest drawings and models.
• Last planner: During construction, last planners for each of the different scopes discuss and agree to one- and three-week look ahead plans.
• Target value design: An integrated effort set achievable cost targets per trade to reduce costs while maintaining cost, schedule, and quality.
• Virtual design or Building Information Modeling (BIM) and construction: Highly detailed models to validate design, user requirements, and constructability resulted in a cost-savings of $15 million and higher schedule reliability and field productivity.

• Coordination before permitting: This ensured constructability input from subcontractors was included in permit drawings.

This is the fifth consecutive year that one of DPR’s projects has won a FIATECH CETI award, beginning with Camino Medical Group Mountain View campus in 2008 followed by Sutter Health Eden Medical Center, University of California, Santa Cruz Porter B College for real-time supply chain management, and last year in this same category for Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, Oakland Patient Care Pavilion in Oakland, CA.