2020Case1Mace

Contents Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2020 7 Case 1 Optimise the Whole Visual Management Removal of Waste VM is applied as a holistic system supporting the visualisation of information to help teams and individuals to gain a better understanding of their role and contribution within the larger frame of a project. The control room is a dedicated co-location space developed to create a transparent and open environment for people to communicate effectively. VM is a key component of the room as people are usually attracted by what they see. The objective is to use visual aids to make communication simple and attractive. Correct representation of information can help mitigate the complexity of production systems, even in chaotic and unpredictable production environments. Among the benefits of VM are that it directly supports other management functions, such as production management, safety management, performance management, and workplace management, allowing optimisation of the process and work flows. In addition, the use of VM tools improves our ability to process information and reduces feedback time for action taking, such that control can be integrated into execution. A digital platform allows virtual tools to be introduced to improve the transparency of planning and to act as an aid for collaborative use in planning and control meetings. Their other benefits include greater discipline in the workplace, continuous improvement, and work facilitation. Figure 3. Collaborative Meeting Waste can be defined as any task that does not add value. Value-added tasks are tasks that meet the following three criteria: • Meets end customer needs. • The task changes the shape or form of a product or service. • Executed right the first time. The ability to identify and removewastes fromall production is a key facet of a Lean production system. Studies have shown that approximately 70% of the activities performed in the designandconstruction industryarenon-value-add (“waste”). The volume of the data processed on the project, and the use of digital field tools to track safety quality, commercial, and programme activities, required a more agile VM solution. In parallel with the improved production control meetings, it was clear that the weekly package dashboard meetings also needed improvement. There were large volumes of issues which were not managed efficiently due to the diverse range of information required to present at the package dashboards. All this information was available digitally and was downloaded and printed to make up the composition of the dashboards. This proved inefficient and often included information that was not the latest available information for the review. Project Manager time was ineffectively used to gather and present the content for the whiteboards. The volume of information made it difficult to process in the meeting. There was a number of meetings required between each discipline working on a package to collate and present the package KPIs. The information was gathered and presented by each package where it was difficult to present the whole project risks and opportunities. This resulted in critical infor- mation that was not presented or updated. Overall, this represented substantial waste in our production control system. The collected information was not sufficiently integrated, which hampered making identification of multi- disciplined dependencies visible. This also raised issues for wasted project improvement opportunities. To increase agility and respond rapidly to unexpected problems, it was essential to shorten the communication time between workers and decision-makers. A digital control room was identified to replace whiteboards in the Big Room meeting. This allowed for collaborative dashboards to be produced and presented digitally. The information displayed was live current package information covering all KPIs for the package. This also did not take away from the VM standard to view the entire project status at a glance. Here all project information could be presented clearly and all stakeholders could identify make-ready-needs. This improved the flow of information as critical information could be actioned in a timelier manner. Respect for People is the cornerstone of Lean thinking as people transform ideas and materials into final useful value. Respecting the contribution of each individual is necessary to tap this resource. In addition, people are central to the success of Lean project delivery, and the production management-based approach of Lean project delivery encourages all efforts to make transparent and then optimise all processes and flows within design and construction work.