365-day lookahead for concrete subs

"Lookahead" in commercial construction usually means a 3-week or 6-week rolling forecast that GCs maintain as a pull from the master Gantt. That model works for the GC because their planning horizon is "what's happening across all 30 trades over the next two months." For a concrete sub, the same horizon is too short. You're booking ready-mix slots 4-8 weeks out. You're committing crews to projects 8-12 weeks out. You need to see further.

The model that fits concrete subs is a rolling 365-day lookahead coupled to a daily schedule, with a one-click approval flow between them.

Why two surfaces, not one

The daily schedule is for committed work

Pours that are locked. Ready-mix is ordered, the crew is named, the pump is booked. This is the source of truth — for cancellation notifications, for the conflict detector, for the GC's distribution. Edits here cascade real-world consequences (a phone call to dispatch, a message to the crew). Treat it as production data.

The lookahead is for planning

Pours that are tentative. You know roughly the project sequencing — slab 1 in week 4, walls in week 8, slab 2 in week 12. You haven't ordered ready-mix yet. The crew assignment is provisional. Edits here are cheap — moving a pour from week 6 to week 7 in the lookahead doesn't notify anyone, doesn't change any commitment.

The flow between them

A pour starts life as a tentative pill on the lookahead. It might bounce around for weeks as the project takes shape. When the GC confirms the sequencing and you're ready to commit, you hover the pill and click the green ✓ to approve it onto the daily schedule. From that moment, it's a real pour: contacts notified, ready-mix ordered, crew assigned, conflicts checked. The approved pill and the live pour stay linked with that ✓.

Why a single Gantt fails this

Master Gantt charts conflate "committed" and "tentative." Every bar on the chart looks the same. When you move a bar from week 6 to week 7, the chart doesn't know whether you just made a real commitment change (notify everyone!) or a planning adjustment (don't notify anyone).

The result: either the team gets notification fatigue from constant tentative changes ("the schedule moved again, again"), or the team stops trusting the chart because they can't tell which bars are real.

What good lookahead behavior looks like

1. Scoped editing, not open to everyone

Lookahead edits should be limited to the people doing the planning. A planner pinned to one office should only be able to reshape that office's pours. Otherwise the lookahead becomes the master schedule and inherits all of the master-schedule problems.

2. Pill-shaped, not bar-shaped

Lookahead items are pours (one date, sometimes a half-day) — not multi-day activities. Visual model should be a calendar with pills on dates, not a Gantt with bars across dates. Pill = "we plan a pour around this day."

3. Grouped by city/office

If you run multiple offices, the lookahead should group projects by city so a planner can see each market's load at a glance, and filter down to one city when they only care about that market.

4. One-click approval into the daily schedule

When a pill becomes real, it should turn into a daily-schedule pour without retyping — one approval, and the two records link. No re-keying the date, project, crew, or pour type.

5. Asymmetric by design

Moving the pill in the lookahead (because project sequencing changed) should not touch the live schedule until you re-approve. The asymmetry is intentional: a planning adjustment is information; promoting a pour to committed is a decision. Approval is the deliberate gate between the two.

The 365-day horizon question

Why 365 and not 90 or 180? Two reasons:

• Bidding feedback. When you bid a job today, your lookahead shows you what you'd be committing to in week 32. The yards/crew totals at that week tell you whether you have capacity. A 90-day lookahead doesn't see far enough to inform bidding.
• Backlog narrative. The owner of the company wants to know "what does our schedule look like through year-end." A rolling 365 gives them the answer in one screen. Twelve quarterly views don't.

The trade-off is signal-to-noise. Pours 9 months out are uncertain. The visual treatment has to handle that — pills further out can look more provisional, less prominent.

How Planning Ops handles it

Place & Finish Hub ships with both surfaces. The Schedule is the daily source of truth — cancellation notifications, conflict detection, weather, yards. The 365-day Lookahead is a rolling pill calendar where planners drag pour-type tiles onto future cells to stage work. Projects group by city into Current and Target (with an ETA chip), and you can Promote a Target into a real project once it firms up. An On Schedule toggle overlays locked pours plus dashed ghost chips so you can sanity-check against the live week. Hover a pill, click the green ✓, and it's approved onto the Schedule — linked by that ✓. A city filter narrows the view to one market, and you can export the lookahead to PDF or XLSX. Collaborators can be pinned to a single office so they only edit that city's lookahead. New to it? The Place & Finish getting-started guide walks through the approve-to-schedule flow.