av Antoine Lamarche 5 år siden
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IMBA 2019 January intake class 3: Operation Management
Final individual exercise: Mind Map on Laing O'Rourke
By: Antoine Lamarche
Lean Construction is about creating value and reducing waste and waste in the construction industry represents 30% of the total activities, causing overrun of the project and delay. Laing O'Rourke is a leader in finding innovative solutions to tackle this waste which are revolutionising the industry. Yet as with all innovators in an established industry they are encountering difficulties certain areas which we will try to address using the framework learned in this course.
Recommendations 1:
Integrated Blockchain in Laing O'Rourke's business. Doing so would help solve the following challenges:
Reduce cost of contracts, improve utilisation of talent and increase the speed of transaction.
Easy to match demand with supply
Easy to track provenance of materials
Full transparency
Inefficient matching of demand with supply
Difficult to investigate illegal or unethical practices.
Lack of transparency in our current system.
The Jidoka culture is being implement slowly on project. Any individual can stop the work on the ground of quality or HS without any risk to his or her career.
It takes time for this cultural shift to permute the organisation as there is always the reluctance to affect the program or the budget by stoping work to resolve issues. With time and a lot of training within the company the culture is slowly changing, leading to much safer places of work and high quality of work as we saw in session 7&8.
All employee are expected to carry out a site tour / inspection at least once a month and to produce a report with best practice observed and improvement that could be made.
As we saw in Session 7&8 this naturally leads back to Kaizen manager are more in tough with what is happening on projects.
Also having so many different people with varied backgrounds that do not usually work on site doing site inspection means that the recommendation are much richer and really provide a lot of added value.
The majority of employee in Laing O'Rourke are site based which allows the team to address all aspect of projects from the the engineering to the document control, BIM Technician and environmental issue.
As per Session 11 this helps break silos the rest of the areas of the business allowing LOR to quickly address any challenges that arise in the project and to have a better alignment of the teams.
For the reason above LOR as set up a "One Team" approach where all individuals are being evaluated on the progress of the project they are working rather than the department they work in.
The Silo problem is still striking when it comes to working with external contractors and supplier.
A we saw in session 7&8 having SRM (Supply Relationship Management) is key to having a lean management.
At LOR Procurement is centralised allowing projects to negotiate better prices for goods and services.
The procurement team select a number of suppliers that it builds a relationship with.
Project are only allowed to use approved suppliers unless special permission has been given by the procurement team. This allow the procurement team to ensure the quality of the suppliers and to audit them to make sure that they are compliant with Laing O'Rourke safety and quality standards.
Where the relationship with the suppliers fail is when it comes to communication to match supply and demand on site.
Laing O'Rourke (LOR) has embraced BIM and digital modelling as way to effectively control some of the challenges they were facing with their off site manufacturing.
Without BIM and digital modelling of site manufacturing would be impossible on the scale LOR is attempting to do it.
It was key to be able to model the entirety of the project within its surroundings to design effective modular solution for that project and to come up with realistic ways to assemble it.
BIM in this this sense is very much used as the agile tool that we saw in session 7&8. it enables LOR to create 3D mock ups to test that their solution will work before actually building prototype and finally the real product reducing the time to market as we saw in session 13.
Laing O-Rourke has the Off site manufacturing capacity trough it Explo're plant. This helps them to run a leaner construction company by moving 70% of the work traditionally done onsite, offsite into their factory thereby removing a lot of the waste in the process through standardise and automate the building processes as we saw in session 7 & 8.
The benefits associated with doing this were:
Cost of the factory:
Laing O'Rourke applies Just in time and "Pull Production" in their manufacturing plant.
Every component is built on demand once an order has been place for the component from site. This requires the design for the building to be locked in place well in advance of construction due to the long lead times for more specific component.
As we saw in session 7&8 using Just in Time and Pull production reduces inventory levels by exactly matching supply with demand thereby reducing the waste related to over production and idle inventory.
Recommendations 2:
Integrated Big Data in Laing O'Rourke's business. Doing so would help solve the following challenges:
This is where big data
The engineering in Excellence group is a multi-disciplinary team with members from diverse backgrounds and industries that strives to find innovative ways to challenge the way the construction industry tackles engineering challenges.
This team uses the agile methodology to come up with minimum viable products that they can test, validate and improve through rapid failure.
Take 5 cards were implement on Laing O'Rourke sites to empower employees to make suggestions to Management teams.
The Management team engages to initiate the process of addressing these suggestion within 2-5 working days depending on the urgency of the suggestion.
This card system is not pure Kaizen. It is acting more as way to get feedback from the employees and address HSE issues rather than purely driving for innovation. They help the sites continuously improve the safety of the sites.
The Agile mindset generated by the Engineering Excellence team finds it difficult to percolate into the business as we saw in session 11 due the resistance to change, internal politics and risk involved with getting things wrong in this industry in terms of:
This makes the industry more reluctant to embrace changes in the Agile methodology which relies on failing fast and often to develop ever more performant prototypes until viable final product can be achieved.
As discussed in session 7&8 the 5s tools could be used to get the rest of the organisation to buy into the process by organising workshops with employees throughout the firm to do Fishbone diagram with value stream mapping would help to identify more waist to get the agile mindset to be come further imbedded within the culture of Laing O'Rourke.
Laing O'Rourke is vertically integrated to provide a one stop solution for infrastructure project.
As we saw session 12 costumer service is essential to running a successful business. Laing O'Rourke achieves this by creating special relationship with main clients. It uses it large array of services and capability to remove a lot of the usual headaches that client have when they have to contract multiple contractors to get the final product.
They own a large and varied range of companies that work together to deliver all aspects of a construction solution using both traditional methods and their in-house DFMA capacity.
The difficulty is increasing the flow of information between the different organisations to create a seamless and lean work flow to reduce the wastes within the current process.
As we have seen in session 2 & 3 it important for Laing to understand the process flow within the companies to remove bottlenecks and match supply with demand. For Laing O'Rourke the main bottlenecks is the flow of information between each subsidiaries which act like individual silos.
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