2019Case16Mercury

61 L EAN C ONSTRUCTION I RELAND A NNUAL B OOK OF C ASES 2019 Case 16 – Mercury Mercury is an Irish-based European contractor. We bui ld and manage complex engineer ing projects that reimagine how people work and live in the built environment. We believe that real innovation happens if you’re willing to be brave. Our determination and sharp focus enable us to deliver leading- edge construction solutions across a range of key sectors including Data Centres, Healthcare, Life Sciences & Technology, Fire Protection, Building Services, and Technical Support Services, taking our clients to new territories they never thought poss ible. Mercury employs 2000 employees across Ireland, the UK and Europe and had an annual turnover of € 770Million in 2018. C O M P A N Y W E B S I T E OVERVIEW & BACKGROUND TO THE LEAN INITIATIVE Mercury has long been an advocate of Lean and has been implementing its principles into work practices for many years. Lean has always been something we strive for and our default position is if there’s an activity or a task that we’re going to perform for our client, safely, we’re always trying to make it happen better, faster, or smarter. We have a Lean programme at Mercury called “Leaders in Lean” where once a week a great idea from a construction site is shared across al l our staf f which comprises 2000 people spread out over 10 countr ies . Addi t ional ly, we’ve recently re-commenced our Yellow Belt programme and are currently in the process of implementing a Green Belt programme as part of our drive towards Kaizen or continuous improvement of our employees so as to ensure the maximum value is added within each and every one of our projects . Approximately one third of our people have been trained to date to either Yellow or Green Belt level. LEAN INITIATIVE UNDERTAKEN – LEAN THINKING, TOOLS, TECHNIQUES www.mercuryeng.com AUTHORS Shay Lacey Value-added (VA) is the key phrase in this case study. We are aware that every day our objective is to complete our work with as much VA time as possible. For our trade operatives work crews, our goal is to add the maximum value to each project every day. Construction crews require a wide variety of different resources such as tools, machinery, etc., on a daily basis to execute works. If these resources can be identified and made available to trades at the start of each day, the likelihood is that non-value-added (NVA) time in the first hour of the working day can be greatly reduced. It has been measured within the industry that the first hour of the working day is by far the most likely to contain the greatest amount of NVA time. The objective of this case study was to create a company- wide Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that would help supervisors and foremen to plan the crews’ works and the required resources ahead of time to ensure that Mercury would achieve more VA works within the first 15-minutes of every working day. This SOP aimed to result in an additional 4% of VA time to the working day. An additional 4% of VA time simply converts to an additional 4% profit on direct labour projects which naturally reinforces the business case for implementing this new process Group-wide across Mercury. Poor planning leads to poor performance, and naturally it is assumed that better planning will result in a better performance in terms of safety and quality, but also contribute to increased VA time across projects. Running an efficient project should always make use of Lean Construction to reduce waste. Using the mnemonic "TIMWOOD" helps to identify waste. Identifying waste allows us to reduce our costs, increase profits, improve lead times and boost customer satisfaction. The easiest way to remember the seven wastes is to ask every day on site "Who is TIMWOOD?". TIMWOOD: • Transport: It was discovered that trades were spending too much time everyday walking to retrieve materials. • Inventory: Pipe storage racks were loaded with materials that trades did not require on a given day, wasting valuable space. • Motion: As per transport, there was too much time spent walking from work areas to retrieve information or drawings. • Over-Production: Our off-site facility was delivering excess materials to what we needed for a given period. • Over-Processing: Employees were spending too much time on getting information required from drawings – we required more clear and concise information for trades. • Defects: Staff were having to re-work elements of works due to them not being done right first time (this can be attributed to the lack of required information mentioned previously in Over-Processing). Using TIMWOOD, our team was able to identify the waste and inefficiencies that we needed to address to increase VA time. In addition to using TIMWOOD to identify waste, Mercury has implemented a var iety of Lean project management tools in order to increase efficiency and improve VA time across projects, including DMAIC, PDCA, LPS, and 5S. The PDCA Cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) This PDCA cycle gave our supervisors the appropriate COMPANY OVERVIEW Jason Toomey