The Joint Impact of Supply Chain Integration Practices on Construction Schedule Performance for California Healthcare Projects

Construction project teams are increasingly embracing supply chain integration practices (SCIPs) for complex projects. These SCIPs utilize formal or informal mechanisms that allow multiple actors and firms to collaborate together for the overall benefit of the project. This paper looks at the joint impact of four of these SCIPs-early involvement of key stakeholders, co-located project teams, multi-party contracts, and the last planner system (LPS)-on construction speed performance. As the use of SCIPs has emerged on construction projects, the interactive complexity between different practices poses challenges for qualitative and quantitative researchers. This paper pilots the use of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis as a middle ground approach to study SCIPs for construction schedule performance. The pilot analyzes nine case studies from California healthcare projects completed between 2010 and 2018. The resulting preliminary findings provide evidence that improved construction speed performance requires colocation-a necessary condition-combined with either early involvement of trade contractors or combined with incentivized multi-party contracts and the LPS. The calibration and conditioning system used for SCIPs in this pilot can be expanded to additional projects and/or to additional outcomes of interest for future research.