No abstract

Studies have shown that there are flaws in the implementation of the Last Planner® System, mainly concerning the use of medium-term planning in construction companies. Among the main related problems, we highlight the difficulty that the management team has in being able to identify constraints sufficiently in advance so that they can be removed. This would avoid interruption of service fronts and a jump in losses due to making-do. In this context, BIM is seen in this paper as a modeling environment of activities constraints that can help to overcome these deficiencies because, in addition to addressing the spatial issues of the undertaking, it can also hold information about the different construction elements, such as information about the unavailability of necessary prerequisites for starting or continuing the service. This article discusses the potential for inserting BIM into the medium-term and short-term planning of construction companies when such a plan is based on the Last Planner®. For this purpose, planning data of five case studies from three different companies have been analyzed in two phases: (i) explain which categories of constraints identified in medium-term planning could be modeled in BIM; (ii) examine the percentage of work packages elaborated in short-term planning meetings could be modeled in BIM. Based on this analysis, regarding the constraints modelling in medium-term planning, it is cocluded that the BIM model with Last Planner® System can support to identifiy and remove constraints in a more agile and efficient way. Great potential for modeling medium-term constraints and of short-term packages occurs mainly for those that refer to Projects, Equipment, Work Safety and Materials.

This paper presents a 3-phased Lean Construction Project (LCP) implemented in a specialized and integrated service company. The purpose of the LCP was to increase productivity and to re-structure Production Planning and Control routines. It was undertaken by a group of internal and external consultants for a period of four months of workshops and more four months of sustainability on-site. The construction project focused by the LCP was the refurbishment of a Coke Oven in a Brazilian Steel Mill.The three workshops regarding the Lean Construction background were: (a) Analysing the construction activities and support process (Planning, Contract Management, Supply, Warehouse, Safety); (b) Redesigning Production Planning and Control tools, routines and responsibilities; and defining a new Work plan schedule regarding takt-time; and (c) a Productivity Workshop implemented through wastes identification, activities reorganization and work provision. For all these workshops, a work group was formed covering consultants, managers, engineers, team-leaders and front-line workers. Finally, the workshop results were assessed through comparison of the productivity indicators with the base-line defined in the Analysis Stage.After the LCP, the project achieved its main objective with the walls assembly productivity improvement by 20%. This result was reached with fewer people performing more efficiently (less time). Moreover, the operational efficiency improvement guaranteed a 46% increase in the gross margin of the contract.

There is an increasing interest in the role of Front-end Design (FED) as one of the vital stages of design processes. It is the stage in which project purposes and goals are defined, requirements captured, refined, and managed and trade-offs are made considering each consequence. It is also the stage where project requirements are transformed into design requirements for implementation by professional teams. FED sets the earliest opportunities for project collaboration to facilitate value generation and delivery. Decision making in this stage often affects most of the later processes in a project. Yet, little evidence and literature exist to support FED design process. This paper examines the role of FED in housing projects, and more specifically investigating one contemporary housing development case study in Porto Alegre-Brazil, exploring how FED facilitated value generation. The research found some evidence of value management in FED processes in the case study. It is also found that more research into user requirements capture and how these facilitate value generation is still required. This paper adds to the growing body of literature in this vital area stage of the design process.

Making production processes stable is the basis of the Toyota Production System (TPS) for improving processes and consequently of increasing the value of production activities. Hence, the set of tools based on the TPS that can be used within the kaizen approach emerges as an opportunity to seek to optimize processes and to increase productivity. The research points out the possibilities of improving production processes in social housing projects through the implementation of structured kaizen events. This article describes the implementation of kaizen events developed in a Brazilian company that constructs residential buildings with a focus on standardizing and stabilizing the process for producing the structure of buildings with a concrete wall typology. The methodology used to develop this study is action research. Based on a kaizen methodology structured in four stages: Definition and preparation; Execution; Monitoring and standardization; and support, the main steps that form the process of building concrete walls were analyzed. The main results obtained are flow improvements in the main stages that make up the construction process, a reduction in the workload and a contribution to reducing and adhering to the total lead time in the concrete wall stage, in addition, providing a reference for structuring kaizen events in the construction environment.