UMass Medical School: Building the Sherman Center from PMA Consultants on Vimeo.

On January 30, 2013, the University of Massachusetts Medical School opened its $400 million, state-of-the-art Albert Sherman Center at a public premiere event attended by Gov. Deval Patrick. Named after UMass Medical School’s former vice chancellor for university relations, the Albert Sherman Center was built by collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Building Authority and by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which provided $90 million in funding and administers Gov. Patrick’s Life Sciences Initiative.

The Sherman Center includes construction of approximately 500,000 SF of space on the main campus, a 1,600-car parking facility, and the expansion of an existing central power plant along with utility loop connections that will be LEED-certified. Executive Director Katherine Craven of the Umass Building Authority said the following about the project team: “The UMass Building Authority is proud of the efficiency, teamwork, cost controls, and quality management exemplified by ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge, Suffolk Construction, and PMA Consultants in the success of the largest public facility construction in Massachusetts.”

“We were the first consultants hired for the project. The Umass Building Authority had a quasi-public process. We were still designing while releasing design packages. We believe that that type of management strategy saved this project well over a year of time. And time is money. And once we were hired we then started to form the team with the architect, construction manager, the commissioning agents and testing companies, and so on.” said Scott Libby, PMA’s project manager.

PMA performed comprehensive owner’s project management services overseeing and monitoring all aspects of the work during all phases of construction. Scope of services included scheduling/project controls, cost control, quality assurance, environmental and safety compliance, site logistics planning, coordination with campus requirements, and coordination of communications with and among all team members. “There were a lot of decisions made in a given day or given week. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of decisions made on this job that required team work, collaboration, and an open, transparent environment,” said Libby.

To qualify for LEED certification, the Sherman Center needed to incorporate design elements that met numerous U.S. Green Building Council standards for efficiency and sustainability. These elements include recycled steel, wood products from sustainable forests, and floor coverings and fabrics that utilize recycled fibers. The Sherman Center also includes special heating and cooling systems designed to recycle rainwater runoff from the roof for use in the campus power plant, saving the center approximately 750,000 gallons of water annually.

The New England Chapter of Construction Management Association of America (CMAA) selected PMA Consultants as the recipient of the Excellence in Program Management Award for their work on a $340 million upgrade and expansion of the UMass Medical Campus in Worcester, MA. Campus improvements included the $442 million Albert Sherman Center, a 1,600-car parking facility, and expansion of an existing central power plant along with utility loop connections that will be LEED-certified. The improvements fulfilled the UMass Medical School project vision to have a leading medical research and development facility.

As part of their commitment, PMA introduced NetPoint, PMA Technologies’ Graphical Path Method® (GPM)-based software to participants; the software received tremendous feedback from faculty and students. As a result, PMA announced it will grant more extensive access to NetPoint, which will include academic licenses to faculty and graduate assistants, computer lab setups, and extended trial versions for students.

The University of Michigan joins the list of select universities in offering NetPoint as part of its curriculum. Other universities to offer courses in NetPoint include the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Northwestern University.

PMA also announces that for the first time, a Michigan graduate student, Sayali Kolte, attended an annual NetPoint User Conference in New Orleans for an intense one-day conference and training. Sayali’s perspective was appreciated among the group of industry scheduling practitioners saying, “NetPoint is a very powerful way of communicating your plan…GPM has a more realistic approach to scheduling, and I believe that in the near future, every company would use this approach.”

PMA will continue its participation in UMCIAP to ensure that the next generation of engineers, schedulers, and project managers stays ahead of the game.

The University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) opened the new Center for Care and Discovery on Saturday, February 23, 2013. The carefully planned move consisted of transporting 145 patients from Mitchell Hospital into the new, state-of-the-art facility. The move started at 7 a.m. and took about seven hours — ending two-and-a-half hours sooner than originally scheduled. The last patient arrived in his new room at the Center for Care and Discovery at 1:58 p.m.

The new 10-story pavilion is more than 1.1 million square feet. The facility accommodates programs in advanced surgery, cancer, interventional radiology and gastroenterology, neuroscience, and high-tech imaging. This new, technology-enabled hospital facility allows UCM to implement best practice clinical care processes within an operating environment of the future. More information can be found at www.careanddiscovery.uchospitals.edu.

The PMA team provided comprehensive owner’s representative services for the entire project. PMA managed the cost and schedule and was responsible for high-level budget issues and oversight of the schedule. PMA also provided customized project controls metrics and reporting. Additionally, UCM hired PMA to support and manage the operations and move planning. PMA developed plans for staffing, communication, technology, and training as well as created a transition budget and an integrated master operations move plan and schedule.

The Bayonne Bridge is the fourth longest steel arch bridge in the world and connects Bayonne, New Jersey to Staten Island, New York. Construction will raise the bridge from 151 to 215 feet, allowing large ships to clear the bridge; the bridge will remain open during construction.

PMA is responsible for risk analysis, project controls, and 4D-BIM model development. PMA created the 3D-model development, elucidating construction staging sequence to the modeling team, and integrating 3D-model components with the schedule using Synchro for their client, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

You can see the Synchro model by clicking on the following link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmdFq2vuTic&feature=youtu.be.

In a joint effort, PMA Consultants, led by Deborah Shaer, along with the Berlin-Boylston Regional School District, HMFH Architects, and CTA Construction Company organized a reuse program with IRN – The Recycling Network. In less than a week, IRN and PMA developed a plan to donate the surplus items to a recipient school in Jamaica that was identified by their charitable partner, Food for the Poor.

The surplus of bookcases, books, AV equipment, and other furniture were sent to St. Georges College in an impoverished neighborhood in Kingston. The items will be used to outfit a new science building. This project made a major contribution to Food for the Poor’s “50 Schools in 50 Months” initiative in Jamaica, with the goal to construct and outfit fifty grade- and high schools by 2015.

The PMA team provided comprehensive owner’s project management services for the new Tahanto Regional Middle/High School that included master project schedule budget compilations, procuring the designer and contractors, chairing building committee meetings, overseeing designer submissions, identifying project risks, and mitigating potential impacts.

Tesla is one of 81 projects included in the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s $4.6 billion Water System Improvement Program to repair, replace, and seismically retrofit aging infrastructure and facilities within the Hetch Hetchy Water System.

The LEED Silver certified facility at the Tesla Portal in San Joaquin County is designed to provide drinking water to the Metropolitan San Francisco area, servicing more than 2.5 million people. Drawing from the unfiltered Hetch Hetchy source, the new facility is one of the largest UV disinfection drinking water facilities in North America (315 mgd) and is currently the largest UV operational facility in California. In addition to the UV facility, the campus includes a chemical storage building, an operations building, chemical injection facilities, a large valve vault, tanks, and other support structures.

The Tesla UV Facility has been the subject of many organization industry papers and has been highlighted in presentations at events such as the 2010 and 2012 Design-Build Institute Conventions. In addition, construction management processes and procedures used on the Tesla project won a PMI College of Scheduling award for innovative, unique application of project controls. The project has also been recognized by the Northern California Chapter of the Construction Management Association and was recently honored with its 2012 Project Achievement Award for projects in the $50–$100 million category.

PMA has provided owner’s representative services for University of Chicago Medicine for over eight years and is proud to support their research initiatives.

PMA is currently the owner’s representative for the New Hospital Pavilion project. PMA also provided owner’s representative services for the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery, the Comer Pediatric Emergency Department, and the Comer Center for Children and Specialty Care; PMA also assisted in the close-out process for Comer Children’s Hospital.

“NetPoint 4.1 is a major milestone for our product and our team. We listened carefully to the marketplace and have made some stunning breakthroughs in usability and performance,” says Tim Mather, Chief Technology Officer of PMA Technologies.

New Release Highlights

Global Edit Mode (GEM)
GEM allows for simultaneous repositioning of all data elements (dates, durations, etc.) on the canvas. With GEM, the look and layout of a NetPoint schedule can now be greatly enhanced with very little time or effort, making GEM the quickest method for optimizing a schedule graphically.

Copy & Paste Object Styles
The copy and paste functionality has been enhanced to offer Object Styles. Object Styles duplicates an object’s display, formatting, and positioning characteristics and allows users to apply one object’s styling to desired objects via one mouse click. Object Styles gives NetPoint users more flexibility when optimizing the overall presentation of the schedule.

Edit-In-Place Descriptions
Schedule layout is often optimized by modifying descriptions (e.g., inserting abbreviations, adding new lines of text, etc.). In prior NetPoint versions, opening a dialog box concealed the canvas. The Edit-In-Place feature now allows users to double click an object’s description and make modifications to effortlessly complete the task.

Graphical Grid Spacing & Calendar Stretch
By clicking and dragging on canvas hotspots, grid spacing and calendar stretch can now be modified more intuitively and quickly. Vertical space between activities can be increased or the canvas stretched to clarify logic relationships. These effects are seen on the canvas instantly without using a keyboard or opening a dialog box.

Early, Late, & Planned Dates
By selecting the Late Date Mode, activities can now be viewed on their CPM late dates along with their resource histograms and curves. This new feature gives NetPoint the ability to schedule forward from the project start date or backward from the project completion date — the choice is up to the planner. In combination with Early and Planned Dates Modes, the new CPM Late Dates Mode makes NetPoint the perfect tool for what-if analyses.

Improved Import/Export
The NetPoint 4.1 release has improved import and export functionality. Import activities using built-in NetPoint calendars from Excel; import actual dates, calendar, and holiday information from Primavera P6; generate target reports including milestones and benchmarks; and import activities into existing schedules. These and other reliability enhancements continue to improve NetPoint’s integration with external applications, allowing data to be entered and transferred seamlessly.

For more information on NetPoint’s new functionality and enhancements or to download your free trial, visit What’s New In NetPoint 4.1.