Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 27 Case 7 Duggan Brothers (Contractors) Ltd. (“DBL”) was founded in 1923 and is one of Ireland’s leading general building contractors with over 120 managerial staff. As a medium-to-large sized construction company, we have successfully completed c.1,000 projects (and counting) in both the public and private sectors.These projects range in value from €5m to €80m across commercial, pharmaceutical, educational, healthcare, residential, and industrial sectors.Construction Excellence is at the heart of everything we do, and we are proud to continue to deliver high-value and high-quality projects for our clients. DBL began its Lean journey in 2014 through attending many of the LCi events and conferences. DBL could see real value in adopting Lean principles and tools to enhance what we do for our clients and customers.Through adopting a leaner approach, we continue to review and improve our systems to ensure we deliver value across our projects for the benefit of all, including our staff, design team members, clients, and end users. Our continuous improvement and learning organisation approach has helped DBL to review many aspects to our company and seek out opportunities for improvement. One area of our company that has developed greatly is our approach to quality control and quality assurance, and how we manage our entire quality process. DBL first achieved the ISO9001 Quality Management Standard in 1993, and we are proud to retain this standard year-on-year.We recently carried out a Lean project on our quality management systems across all our projects to identify opportunities for improvement.Our comprehensive quality auditing process gathers valuable information to allow each project team to become aware of what is required to be addressed to improve the results for each individual project and our company overall. Company Overview DUGGAN BROTHERS dugganbrothers.ie Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Michael Greene Author This case study focuses on our organisation’s quality audit process to ensure we comply with our company’s own quality requirements and to the requirements of ISO9001:2015 international standard. The purpose of this project was to identify areas for continuous improvement within our quality control and quality assurance processes. The desired outcome of this project was to ensure that our company standards, along with local and international standards, are effectively implemented and maintained throughout the lifecycle of our quality management processes.The purpose of this Lean initiative was to identify ways to eliminate waste in our systems and to deliver an efficient service to both our internal and external customers, namely, internal staff and external third parties. Through gathering information during our internal quality auditing assessments, this process improvement project identified several opportunities that could be improved. One of the key aspects to developing our Lean approach was to adopt PDCA across all aspects of our company,whilst implementing the various Lean tools to improve our approach to delivering high-quality projects for our clients. Control measures, such as standard working procedures, along with implementing regular continuous improvement workshops ensure we become a leaner construction company as we remove waste from various processes. Our continuous improvement approach has allowed us to become leaders in the industry and enabled our staff to develop initiatives to improve many areas of our organisation, both on-site and off-site, including our office-based staff. Quality Assurance and Quality Control is a centre point to DBL delivering high-quality projects for our clients. Our quality management objective is to achieve “Right FirstTime EveryTime” within every aspect of our company in order to deliver the most efficient and cost-effective projects for our clients. Our company’s policy is to maintain and continuously improve our record of providing buildings of the highest quality in conformance with our client’s specified requirements, safely, on time, and within budget.We endeavour to work as a team in a spirit of cooperation with our clients and their professional representatives to achieve our successful project outcomes. It is essential that everyone working in our company is fully aware of their role within the organisation and their responsibility for carrying out this function to the highest standard as part of an overall team effort, and in full compliance of ISO 9001:2015. This Lean initiative allowed us assess the current state and future state of our quality management processes, and the findings from this initiative were reviewed in detail to improve what we do. Our quality audits are carried out to ensure that we comply with Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTIzMTIxMw==