Kaizen as an Improvement Method for Concrete Walls Construction in Social Housing Project

Abstract

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.