Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 56 i I l l f Case 15 Established in Ireland in 1984, Suir Engineering is an Irish-based European provider of Mechanical & Electrical services to high-profile clients in the data centre, life sciences, manufacturing, commercial, substation, and renewables sectors. Suir Engineering has offices in Waterford, Dublin, London, Sweden, Denmark, and across the UK, and directly employs over 1,000 highly skilled staff. Suir Engineering has developed a reputation for delivering cost-effective solutions for its clients whilst ensuring an uncompromised approach to safety, quality, and project delivery. Suir Engineering is a wholly-owned subsidiary of EDF Energy Services, a JV between EDF Energy & Dalkia. Since 2015, Suir Engineering has invested in its strategic and company-wide improvement initiative entitled “SuirWay”. Since April 2018, the company has rolled out new processes for managing the entire organisation based on Lean principles and PDCA. As part of the SuirWay, and the drive to constantly improve, we wanted to transform our services into a centre of excellence with the client as our core focus.We started discussions with a client in the pharmaceutical industry and they highlighted an issue with our dayworks process, namely that it was prolonged and occasionally contained errors.The existing dayworks process was based on a manual daily worksheet requiring a Suir Engineering foreperson to record time and materials used for the works completed, and then for the client to sign the daily worksheet to confirm works were completed (see Figure 1).Once signed, the quantity surveyor would then scan and update values to the client’s computerised account. This case study details the examination and improvement of this process in eliminating waste via the application of the core Lean principles: identify value,map the value stream, create flow, establish pull, and seek perfection. Suir Engineering had no conclusive records of how long the dayworks process actually took.The improvement initiative entailed us connecting several site teams working across different sites in Ireland for the same client, to become a“Suir Engineering Network Team”. Firstly,we set out to make visible the entire process for the daily worksheet journey, and the initial step was tomap our current state, identify waste, improve efficiency, and adopt Lean problem solving and thinking. A consensus within Suir Engineering was that the dayworks process had worked for 35 years and it didn’t need changing.Our challenge was to identify the lead time for the dayworks process and eliminate errors. Across several sites, we carried out quantitative surveys to establish the lead time and waiting times, and then added a layer for suggestions to identify improvements.The creation of the Suir Engineering NetworkTeam provided the difference. Later in the project, we could prove that the data was not just restricted to the pharmaceutical sector, but rather the data came from various sectors.We wanted to improve the dayworks process not just on pharmaceutical sites but across the organisation.The dayworks survey reflected the exact timings of the process, and we used the data for our value Company Overview SUIR ENGINEERING suireng.ie Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques Elaine Harrington Author Figure 1. (Then) Manual DailyWorksheet (extracted sheet from dayworks book)
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