The Challenge
Suffolk Construction’s project team was leading the preconstruction and construction planning for a life sciences development project where schedule certainty was critical to project success.
With the team anticipating that large-scale asset delivery would involve unforeseen constraints and shifting dependencies, Suffolk adopted ALICE during preconstruction to strengthen planning and prepare for deeper schedule analysis, identify bottlenecks, and guide targeted optimization opportunities.
As the project progressed, unforeseen delays driven by procurement challenges and external dependencies threatened a critical milestone.
The project team needed a clear way to diagnose what was driving negative float, validate sequencing assumptions, and identify feasible options to accelerate work without inflating costs or straining field teams.
The Approach
Diagnosing schedule drivers
ALICE enabled the scheduling team to visualize the schedule on a 2D digital canvas.
The project’s Scheduling Director, Dawn Polley, used ALICE’s Schedule Insights Agent to interrogate the schedule and understand the true drivers of the critical path and uncover optimization opportunities.
ALICE identified that resequencing could accommodate parallel work fronts, enabling earlier and simultaneous installation of multiple equipment units.
Once the team confirmed and adjusted the schedule to bring roof equipment tasks forward, this change alone helped reduce negative float by 22 days.
Dawn commented, “Insights Agent is a powerful enhancement to the ALICE platform. It delivers real tactical value to our teams by helping us surface optimizations, validate opportunities, and clearly communicate schedule updates and reasoning with stakeholders.”
Identifying targeted productivity opportunities
Further, using ALICE’s optimization engine, Dawn evaluated acceleration options. ALICE identified three trade tasks that would drive significant improvement if their productivity increased just by 30%.
Aleksey Chuprov, Senior Vice President, Data & IT at Suffolk Construction, added, “Our objective was to recover the delay caused by an external factor and accelerate the overall schedule. ALICE’s Insights Agent was able to analyze the schedule quickly, to look for opportunities for adjustment.”
Aleksey continued that the value came both from visibility and optimization, emphasizing, “On its own, Insights Agent can create value in just highlighting what can be improved but when connected to the optimization algorithm, it allowed us to save days, to improve productivity by 30 percent.”
Communication and reporting
ALICE’s Schedule Insights Agent and AI difference report were used to generate detailed reports of schedule summaries and optimization drivers along with reasoning including the associated risks and opportunities. This greatly improved confidence and alignment across the entire project team.
Senior Vice President, Data & IT
