Increasing productivity on an industrial construction project with lean

Over the years, since its conception, the lean philosophy has become established across the most varied sectors as an indispensable paradigm for operational excellence and for the evolution of companies' management systems. Given this context, this case  demonstrates the potential of applying a lean project whose main objective was to raise productivity in the construction of a Brazilian thermoelectric power plant.

An extremely challenging project was used as a pilot, since it involved elaborate engineering, heavy supply demand and a large interface between disciplines. However, lean thinking provided practical guidelines aligned with the problems occurring on site to overcome the challenges presented, achieving, already in its initial efforts, a 38% increase in productivity across the entire flow of activities. But how was this possible?

Increasing productivity by eliminating waste on the construction site

In construction, it is very common for the transport and replenishment of materials to be carried out by the frontline worker themselves. This generates tremendous waste and a drop in productivity, because these employees stop focusing their efforts on activities that add value. On average, in the market, only 30% of all of a frontline construction worker's daily work is actual adding and building, with the other 70%, on average, consisting of support activities, preparation or waste, such as waiting, transport and motion.

To make better use of the workers' time, the construction company formed a dedicated logistics team to help increase productivity. With the advance visibility passed on by the production team and with the organization of the warehouse, the logistics team was able to receive requisitions one week in advance, making it possible to organize “kits” that would be delivered to the work front. This avoided unproductive time for the production teams, which previously went to the warehouse and the stockyard to look for, pick up and transport some materials.

Avoiding bottlenecks with a holistic view

When lean initiatives focus on increasing the productivity of a specific process on the site but fail to look at the entire value stream and at the impact their actions will have on the chain, the imminent result is the creation of islands of efficiency, because other processes will end up becoming bottlenecks that prevent the overall productivity from increasing. For this reason, the project team decided to create a collaborative, multidisciplinary planning process.

The traditional view of construction projects focused on isolated disciplines was broken down by this collaborative planning, as they invested in several site replanning sessions with the help of the “pull planning” tool (or “pulled planning”). The leaders, managers and operational staff of the departments (production, supply, engineering and planning) easily identified the interfaces between disciplines and departments and established actions to mitigate or eliminate these problems.

With the holistic view brought by collaborative planning, the team involved was also able to prioritize engineering and supply actions based on an understanding of the field activities; that is, these departments' priorities were set based on the reverse flow of the main execution activities.

Solving problems quickly to keep up with the pace of production

With the increase in productivity observed 1.5 months after the start of the lean project on site, the engineering and supply departments had difficulty keeping up with the pace, which proved to be a risk to the sustainability of the results. One of the main reasons the production team achieved these advances was that they began meeting daily at the end of the workday in order to understand the problems and to better align the work fronts, seeking to complete activities entirely instead of advancing the fronts as the preceding services were released.

Inspired by the new production practices, the managers also began holding a remote meeting to resolve the engineering and supply “pending issues” that were impacting production; thus, unresolved field demands were passed on to the site management meeting. Routines were also implemented to carry out a scheduled shutdown for maintenance of the gas pipelines, which helped  reduce the time to resolve pending issues from six days to two, consequently reducing the duration of the shutdown by 23% (which represented 61 days of the project).

Dissemination to other industrial projects

The lean project at this industrial site brought great results in terms of increased productivity and reduced lead time, in addition to intangible results reported by the team, such as better team cohesion, greater openness to expose problems and greater employee satisfaction. The consolidation of the learnings and the success of this case have served as  a lever for internal dissemination to the company's other projects, with the aim of further improving the company's competitiveness.