THE LAST PLANNER SYSTEM OF CONSTRUCTION PLANNING AND CONTROL AS A TEACHING AND LEARNING TOOL Eugenio Pellicer 1 , Fernando Cerveró 1 , Alicia Lozano 1 , José Luis Ponz-Tienda 2 1 Universitat Politècnica de València (SPAIN) 2 Universidad de Los Andes (COLOMBIA) Abstract During the last years a new philosophy of production has been successfully implemented, not only in manufacturing (lean production), but also in other “old-fashioned” sectors such as construction (the so- called lean construction). Since 2008, a group of academicians at the Universitat Politècnica de València has started the introduction of lean construction in the Spanish building industry promoting meetings, writing papers and teaching the topic. A special mention deserves a new course on Lean Construction started at the Master of Science in Planning and Management in Civil Engineering. Not only in this graduate course, but also in some undergraduate courses, this group of teachers has implemented games that try to simulate the behavior of the real construction industry. One of the most interesting simulations deals with the implementation of the Last Planner System at the construction site. The Last Planner System is a cascade planning technique that allows a better control in order to reduce variability at the construction site. This article describes the experience and recommendations obtained from the implementation of a Pull Session at the graduate and undergraduate courses. A Pull Session is the first main step of the Last Planner System technique that sets the initial planning and the strategic objectives and milestones for the construction project. Several sessions were conducted with students of several graduate and undergraduate courses. By applying the practice to a real construction project, the students performed different roles (site manager, foreman, subcontractors, suppliers, etc.), whereas the teacher was the facilitator of the session. This way, students were able to experience and witness the needs and issues that arise when planning properly a construction project, learning the advantages of collaborative work at the same time. Keywords: Construction, Planning, Simulation, Teaching. 1 INTRODUCTION Planning distribute and combine the available resources during a specific time for each of the project tasks, optimizing cost and keeping a right level of quality. However, the traditional layout of construction planning is unfit for taking into consideration the uncertainty and variability, which leads to many problems in construction sites (Rodriguez et al., 2011). This was learnt long ago by car manufacturers that developed just-in-time or lean production philosophy in order to optimize production (Womack et al., 1990). This approach has been adapted to the construction industry by Koskela (1992), being called lean construction (Alarcón and Pellicer, 2009). This author (Koskela, 2000) introduced a holistic view of construction as an information and resources flow, with three key goals: cost reduction, time saving and value added to the client. Construction requires planning by different people, in different work posts of the organization, as well as in various stages of the infrastructure life-cycle; eventually, somebody decides what specific job will be done (assignment) and by whom the following day. Ballard and Howell (1994) called this person or group the “last planner”; usually these persons or organizations are: site supervisors, foremen, subcontractor, supplier, etc. Therefore, planning can be developed in cascade, taking in consideration greater level of detail (zoom in) as long as the project advances and planning can be more specifically described (Nicholas and Steyn, 2008). A key technique in the lean construction philosophy is the Last Planner System (LPS hereafter) of planning and control (Ballard, 1994). LPS is a planning and control technique in cascade whose main purpose, besides (the usual) production control, is the reduction of the work variability by applying three basic principles (Rodriguez et al. 2011): (1) coordination of the last planners (those who actually decide on site) through regular meetings, (2) commitment of these last planners, and (3) public visibility of the results obtained (weekly), through the use of a basic indicator for control called Percent Plan Complete (PPC). Proceedings of INTED2015 Conference 2nd-4th March 2015, Madrid, Spain ISBN: 978-84-606-5763-7 4877