Labor Flow Optimization (LFO) is a software-enabled production planning regimen that assures continuous utilization of available construction labor resources for optimum productivity and safety using production planning software based on the Last Planner System®. LFO enables flexibility and speed in daily trade worker management on the jobsite to avoid dangerous worker congestion in tight spaces, costly rework caused by incorrect task sequencing, and potential litigation for lost labor productivity. It does this by providing master schedulers, superintendents, and crew foremen a shared, detailed view of all planned and in-progress trade activities that allows them to ensure that the right skills are always in the right place at the right time for efficient and effective task execution.
Without LFO, the common, natural variances that occur throughout the workday can cause cascading and sometimes catastrophic delays in the trade workflow. These variances can include changes in the delivery of materials and equipment, the discovery of the need for unplanned tasks, the occurrence of design inconsistencies, disagreement between the master schedule and the production plan, or the unavailability of certain trade skills when and where they are needed.
With LFO, variances can be rapidly recognized, reported, and remediated through real-time collaboration between project superintendents and trade foremen, enabling them to quickly change the production workflow to avoid delays and lost productivity by reassigning crews to other ready tasks or resequencing tasks to take full advantage of ready workers.
In addition to enabling the general contractor to manage task execution more easily for multiple trade partners on a project, LFO also enables the specialty contractors to manage multiple crews more easily across multiple projects. And for project owners, LFO dramatically reduces the impact of labor issues on project profitability.
