Elimination of Wastes in Construction: A Case-Study

ELIMINATION OF WASTES IN CONSTRUCTION: A CASE-STUDY

Dr Subhash Chandra Rastogi,  M. Tech., Ph.D., PMP, PMI-ACP,

Chairman, BT & BT Management Consultancy, Hyderabad

ABSTRACT: One of the most important focuses of Lean is to provide enhanced value to the customer, by eliminating all the wastes. This paper clearly defines the EIGHT WASTES with reference to various type of Building construction. It also mentions the various Lean Tools related to People, Processes, Products and Technologies, which help in eliminating or at least minimizing those eight wastes

A case-study of a multi-storied towers of a world-class hotel-cum-apartments of 1.5 millions Sq. Ft. is presented, which focuses on the elimination of Defect/ Snags as the main waste, and the associated additional rework cost and project delay.  Although most Constructions companies have their Quality Management System with various certifications of ISO etc., the clients are not generally happy with the quality of the end product. The author has observed that their focus is more on Quality Control, rather than Quality Assurance, especially with the low skilled workmen and site supervision. This paper provides the details of how some of the snags prevention and containment lean tools and best practices, like Historical Statistical Snags analysis, Pareto Analysis, Root-Cause Analysis, 1st Piece mock-up and inspection, inter-trade collaboration & optimizing the sequences of activities saved tens of thousands of USD, and 6 weeks of project delay, giving close to zero-defect product to the client.

KEY WORDS: Lean Digital, Eight Wastes, Lean Tools, Snag Preventer, Change Management

INTRODUCTION:

Construction Industry is undergoing metamorphosis globally, and now is the time for India to reimagine its construction strategies. This is specially so because more than one trillion USD is proposed to be invested in this sector in next 6-7 years, which has to be utilized optimally, looking at paucity of capital in the country. Besides these, due to demographic shift, bigger global exposure and globalization in general, customers have also changed a lot in India,. On one hand the demand for buildings is growing very fast, on the other hand, customer wants more (quality) for less (cost) due to paucity of funds. The older methods of making profit in Construction Industry (through unrealistic land-price increases, channelizing fund of one project to other, early collection of payments from End Customers/ Users) are no more workable. Therefore there is no choice with Industry to relook at the way it has been executing the construction projects today.  

Most construction projects are getting delayed, getting over-budget, delivering poor quality leading to unhappy customers. In our opinion the top ten reasons are given below:

• Low Labor productity for various reasons
• Poor Planning and many interupptions in the work
• Very high % of efforts on non-value addiing activities from Customer’ end-users perspective
• Low trust, integrity among the trades
• Management & project Team always busy and no time to improve project performance
• Poor communication and collaboration among trades
• (Too) many Contractors/ Consultants/ Sub-Contractors involved and (unnecessarily) leading to a high level of specialization & division of labor.  
• Contract based execution creates several silos of functioning rather working for common goals of the project and its success.
• Measurable and controllable KPIs are not defined for various roles for project success.
• Claims & disputes due to several deviations/ changes / rework during the execution process

In order to drive a positive change and address most of these issues successfully, there is a need for alternative thinking.  Doing same thing again and again do not yield better results. New methods, tools, techniques and practices have to be introduced in construction projects to drive positive change. The auther recommends to use Lean Digital™, a new philosophy which brings alternate project execution and produce positive results. This will integrate the Digital technology to Lean and multiply the benefits of Lean. We have defined the the following 12 principles for this.