Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2021 78 within the departments, together with enhancing interactions and communications between departments.That way, trust is gained between employees in different departments by means of open communication lines within the workplace, building relationships outside of the formal work-based environment, and by building a culture of working not only for the company, but for one another as well. During the process of working with the departments, an additional focus point will be to identify talent which employees have beyond their day-to-day scope of work that might be valuable to the company, combined with the opportunity to identify learning requirements and aspirations of the employees.Although we have only started this process with one department, the possibility of what we will be able to do within departments by extracting non- or under-utilised skills is exciting for the future of Modubuild’s internal systems and teamwork across the different departments. Modubuild also started a ManufacturingTechnician Apprenticeship Program this year with two apprentices, and we hope to take in 20 apprentices by the end of 2022.Once again, this program strives to deliver graduates that are already familiar with Modubuild’s company culture in addition to being readily trained in the manufacturing roles we will require them to step into. These are just some of the current strategies being actioned.While most are only at the initiation stage, we are hoping that these will lead to a whole new way of approaching the implementation of Lean within Modubuild. Lean Initiative Improvements & Impact As stated, this initiative is only at the beginning stages and we hope to have it fully up and running at the beginning of 2022.The impact cannot yet be determined; however, going back to our main objective,we want to embed Lean thinking into all new and existing employees.When you have properly trained staff who are confident in their work, the outcome is low risk and high-quality work being delivered at a fast pace. Our foundation phase will be branched by a few other strategies in early-2022. A different area of concern we identified is that, with the growing number of projects we now run simultaneously, we are often stuck with a single person with the required expert knowledge to complete a specific task/job.To address this, we will set up a Mentorship Program within the company wherein senior staff will be shadowed once a week for an hour, along with sessions in which they will sit down and carry over some of their knowledge and skills to someone else within their department. Reverting to the fact that a lot of employees are not currently being used to their full potential, we trust that this again will aid in utilising our internal resources and skillsets more effectively.We also aim to partner with further education and training providers to host/attend group training sessions as a company/department, contributing to the overall company culture throughout all departments. With the number of employees currently employed by Modubuild, we are still managing to capture training and keep track of expiration dates manually; however, with employee numbers growing exponentially, we are looking to automate our training system by means of software called “Mango”. Implementing Mango will reduce both the labour hours and human risk factor of capturing and inducting training. Mango will also help us to further automate our Induction Program as well as other in-house training initiatives that we may wish to undertake. Finally, Modubuild plan to implement a Chartership Support Program, where we support our personnel with the paperwork and training they require to obtain the correct amount of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) points to ultimately register and maintain chartership at the different professional bodies. Although having different departments is an important aspect for a company, we have found ourselves operating in departmental silos the last while. However, we are hopeful that by working through these strategies, we will also create better internal communication channels between the departments, leading to operating more as a team rather than several different departmental teams. Figure 4. Team Modubuild Operations In conclusion, we expect that the effective implementation of continuous learning and development programs will result in a leaner and more streamlined workforce.We are hopeful to create employees who operate Lean thinking principles daily, and we as a team look forward to operating under one umbrella with improved internal systems and communications achieved by implementing these strategies. Case 21
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