Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 73 Case 20 Collen Construction is a family-owned company, with a history dating back over 200 years and a reputation for building quality and excellence.The firm is an international construction company with operations in Ireland, Germany, and Sweden. Collen is currently ranked in the top 5 main building contractors in Ireland, and has experience in private and public-sector projects, as design and build contractor,management contractor, and joint venture partner. The company’s portfolio includes commercial office fit-outs, data centres, life sciences, industrial warehousing, retail, and conservation and refurbishment projects, ranging in value from under €1 million up to €700 million. Privately owned by seven generations of the Collen family, and founded over 200 years ago, Collen Construction is supported on a firm foundation of experience, knowledge, commitment, and pride in its achievements.The company’s success and expansion over the last decade is due to committed teammembers and highlyqualified management and technical staff.The management teams operate in partnership with client representatives,design consultants, and subcontractors to ensure delivery of projects to the highest standards on time and within budget. The culture of continuous improvement within our day-to-day operations at Collen Construction means that our organisation continuously strives to exceed our clients’ expectations through the adoption of new and innovative Lean practices.The successful delivery of large, complex builds depends largely on the rigorous and systematic approach to scheduling – a tactic that Collen embraces from project initiation stage right through to project hand-over.This culture empowers our project delivery teams to challenge the status quo and make the best plans even better. At Collen, we believe that collaboration is a fundamental tool for problem solving, and the partnership approach that we adopt with our subcontractors supports a working environment of trust and transparency to get to the right solutions fast.Our decision in Q4 of 2020 to invest heavily in Snychro 4Dmeant we could make further enhancements to our planning processes, taking us and our supply chain to the next step with immediate improvements across safety, quality, productivity, and efficiency.The 4D planning allows us to combine our 3Dmodels with the project schedule, thus enhancing the way we visualise project information in comparison to Gantt charts that, for certain types of projects, cannot provide a complete view of all interactions and sequences of activities. Company Overview COLLEN CONSTRUCTION collen.com Overview & Background to the Lean Initiative Willie Loughnane Author Lean Initiative Undertaken – Lean Thinking, Tools, Techniques Over the past five-year period, Collen has successfully completed a number of fast-track, hyperscale data centres across Europe. These projects are complex in nature and require an exceptional level of detailed planning across multiple engineering disciplines. The schedules associated with these projects have become more and more demanding, forcing us as an organisation to look beyond the traditional methods of construction scheduling and leverage the latest software and digital tools to support a leaner and more efficient way of planning our projects. Furthermore, our clients’ business needs often hinge around schedule certainty, thus pushing us to find an effective solution to creating more accurate programmes that ultimately minimise the risk of delays to the typical mission-critical milestones associated with data centre delivery. Over the years, Collen has embedded a very effective platform for collaborative planning across all projects in the form of weekly last planner sessions.Our commitment to the Kaizen philosophy means that we are constantly in pursuit of operational excellence, striving to find possible areas of improvement to further enhance our Lean Construction tools and techniques. As useful as these sessions are for validating and enhancing the project schedule, we found it increasingly difficult to get a complete view of all subcontractor interactions and sequence of activities.We also needed a tool that could enable better communication between the various parties and therefore reduce any misunderstandings from the start.Progress monitoring too in terms of schedule and cost can oftentimes become extremely challenging on these hyperscale projects; and truly understanding our actual progress versus our planned progress on site involves a significant amount of administrative work across multiple team members on a weekly basis. Furthermore, creating an environment of certainty and transparency underpinned our partnership approach to project delivery and any improvement in schedule reporting was fully supported by all stakeholders.Also, the proper coordination of multiple contractors in the field is a critical factor in site safety and the implementation of 4D scheduling for logistics planning was going to be a convincing step forward to a safer work site.
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