2018Case17Mercury

62 L EAN C ONSTRUCTION I RELAND A NNUAL B OOK OF C ASES 2018 Case 17 – Mercury Engineering Mercury Engineer ing, founded in 1972, cont inues to operate as an entrepreneurial Engineering Contractor with three guiding principles: Safety, Quality, and Delivery. This has been the cornerstone to being the most successful mul t i -di scipl inary engineering contractor in every sector and geographical area in which we operate. Headquartered in Dublin, Mercury deliver complex engineering projects across var ious sectors , including Data Centres, Hyperscale & Enterprise, Life Sciences, Healthcare, Fire Protection, Building Services, and Technical Support. Mercury employ over 3,000 employees across Ireland, the UK, and Europe, and has an annual turnover of € 700M. C O M P A N Y W E B S I T E OVERVIEW OF THE LEAN INITIATIVE Those familiar with Lean principles will know the seven wastes, and the focus in this Lean project was on finding and eliminating invisible wastes. Inventory, Defects , and Over-Product ion are wastes that we readily identify with and can spot qui te eas i ly; however, Transport, Waiting, Movement, and Over-Processing can be harder to spot. These can be descr ibed as the “invisible” wastes. Our goal for this project was to identify and eliminate these invisible wastes by applying the DMAIC methodology: Def ine, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control. LEAN INITIATIVE UNDERTAKEN – LEAN THINKING, TOOLS, TECHNIQUES www.mercuryeng.com AUTHORS Gerry Walsh The core foundation for Mercury on this Lean initiative was to adopt DMAIC as its core Lean approach to improvement. DMAIC ensured Mercury could make significant gains in quality, schedule, and productivity by making many small improvements over time in a continuous structured format. Figure 2. Improvement Initiatives. Direct observation in the field was critical to DMAIC as it allowed our team to identify the once invisible wastes such as time spent retrieving materials, setting-up work, and motion around site. Using this data, we developed innovative ways to reduce such non-value-adding (NVA) activities while in turn maximising time spent completing value-added (VA) work, for example, installing pipe, tray, and brackets. Our team of experts on site reviewed the data weekly to track, analyse, and generate improvement ideas . Us ing our cont inuous improvement approach, we strove to have everything needed to complete the task right at the workface and to remove all obstacles impeding workflow. Our Lean programme further instilled the mindset on site that qual ity on al l areas of the project is everybody’s responsibility. We set up a right-first-time (RFT) indicator allowing us to accurately see any reason why something might not be installed RFT. The RFT data is analysed weekly in Pareto format and drilled into via root-cause analysis, thus giving us a clear direction to where improvements can be BACKGROUND TO THE LEAN INITIATIVE In 2014, Mercury was working with a very well-known large semiconductor manufacturer installing tools for their production process. We had the twin objective that all contractors face: delivery on time for the Client, and make a margin for our company. We were having problems delivering on both of those objectives and we needed a new way forward. We chose to apply the DMAIC approach to our situation. Our work was being undertaken in a highly congested and complex environment that presented the team with some significant challenges. The team as a whole had already embraced Lean Construction and were familiar with the principles of the seven wastes. Several of the seven are readily visible, but what we needed to do was to find and eliminate the invisible wastes. We defined our challenge as being to “Identify and Eliminate Invisible Wastes”. With this in mind, we decided to undertake some direct observation. This is a very powerful tool in the Lean Construction armoury and can help to identify all sorts of wastes, but it must be done with a huge degree of cooperation from all involved. It is then crucial to move the opportunities quickly through the DMAIC cycle. Figure 1. The DMAIC Methodology. COMPANY OVERVIEW Gary Widger