The last year has been dark in the construction market and the bottom of the wave is probably not in sight yet. Despite the gloomy situation, or rather because of it, we have to think carefully about how we allocate development contributions to the construction industry. In terms of the industrialization of construction, how we change planning, procurement and the connection of supply chains to the construction site becomes central.
In his blog post, Antti Aaltonen, the director responsible for construction development at Rakennusteollisuus RT, pointed out that a single company cannot change the entire industry. We need joint standardization of product data and standardization of design process data, as well as a national division of labor, so that we as an industry can finally benefit from digitization.
If we continue as before, partial optimization will lead our industry to even bigger problems. This will be realized at the latest when stricter environmental requirements for construction begin to be demanded from outside the industry. As the required amount of data increases, there are no alternatives for machine data processing.
How do we work now in pace production?
Pace production has increased the productivity of the construction industry and accelerated the completion of projects. At the same time, it has made visible the problem that gave birth to the industry's Last Planner System (LPS). The construction project is practically the coordination of the execution plans of the different subcontractors. That's why we've run into problems when trying to move from a week's pace to a shorter pace at construction sites. It is difficult to control the flow of material or work, because the manufacturing process of the product, i.e. the building or its part, is not known.
A closer look at the problems of pace production shows that the pace of the week is actually traditional contract work with a one-week interim goal without penalty. In the manufacturing process, the actual implementation planning, procurement and procurement have mainly been outsourced to different subcontractors as part of the part of the manufacturing process managed by each. Due to subdivision and outsourcing, the last moment to agree the work orders made by the individual subcontractors necessary for the construction of different building parts is at the construction site. That's why many contractors have stopped in the development of pacing production for a long pacing time and a large pacing area, and haven't been able to move on from the weekly pace.
If we follow the activities of the employees of individual contractors on the floors of the apartment building, we notice that the employees often complete several apartments at a time in parts. The employees carry out some of the work steps consecutively and some in parallel during the week in different apartments. In other words, flow and pace production is indeed batch production, and the way it is implemented depends on the individual employee. The amount of unfinished work is large and the lead time is not getting shorter.
As a result, there is a lot of stock, because at the pace of a week, the building usually has a floor where 1–2 people work. Typically, on the floor of an apartment building, work is done in a maximum of two apartments while the other workstations are empty, even though the work should flow. The weekly pace is often justified by the fact that it enables changes and gives time to solve problems. The challenge in the situation is that the same problems are solved again and again. The way out of this impasse is work standardization. In the current situation, the work cannot be standardized, because the product that is the subject of the work has not been designed to such an extent that it would enable the task content and order of the work, the necessary parts and materials to be standardized. Standardization, i.e. standardization of work, is the cornerstone of industrial production.
Nowadays, the construction process produces plans whose level of accuracy is not sufficient for manufacturing. Implementation plans are, in fact, plans enabling tendering by procurement. Based on them, the main contractor acquires part of the materials directly at the site and part through a subcontractor, whereby the material, quantity and quality risk is transferred to the subcontractor in addition to the implementation risk. The main contractor accepts the materials proposed by the subcontractor as a designer and partly by the client, but we cannot complete the building's parts list with this method of operation.
The subcontractor makes the final detailed design and implementation on a case-by-case basis for his own work plans or the solutions are made on the site floor. The subcontractor's employee decides the final execution method either alone, together with his supervisor or together with the main contractor's supervisor at the site. In the worst case, the responsible foreman, foreman and supervisor form a temporary planning office together, so that the employee can get the missing implementation plan and the work can continue again.
The standardization of design titles is key for us to move forward with digitalization
Logically, one of the most important root causes of the problem of pace production is in the design. Controlling the manufacturing process requires supplementing the details of the plans with regard to detailed planning from each area of design to a more detailed level. This does not mean that the designers start planning more and with little detail, but that we get the metadata of the plans to the level required for machine processing.
In practice, this requires standardization of design titles, so that we can determine the design level (Level of Detail, LoD) in different types of buildings and the information corresponding to the level from the plans in structural forms to databases for machine processing. The manufacturing industry calls this list of parts compiled from engineering titles an E-BOM (Engineering Bill of Materials). The standard nomenclature combined with the use of LoD enables the automatic creation of a parts list with location information, which is a prerequisite for the introduction of machine processing in procurement.
Procurement can move from project purchasing to being the ruler of supply chains as soon as planning produces information about materials in a structural form with standardized design titles reinforced with attribute information by location. Structured information serves as a basis for orders, because thanks to standardization, procurement is able to determine purchase items from standardized design items on the platform or in its procurement systems based on rules. The manufacturing industry uses the name M-BOM (Manufacturing Bill of Materials) from the list of parts formed from purchase items. In the ERP of the construction industry, the M-BOM is core information to which the scheduling software and the software of transport companies can later be connected as the digitalization of supply chains progresses.
Mechanical data processing is an important part of industrial manufacturing
The manufacturing industry for mechanical data processing has developed its own systems, which are called MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning). The use of purchase items in orders, combined with locations, enables M-BOM data to be connected to the production schedule, which is managed in the construction's own software. Information about the parts list by premises and building parts is essential for the construction process, because in this case the main contractor receives information about the construction site in a structured form in his systems, which enables home calls of materials according to the schedule, paced logistics and mechanically generated workflows.
In order for us to move forward in material management, we need electronic material reception and storage locations in a machine-readable format. In this case, we implement the internal logistics of an established factory at the construction site in manufacturing production, which covers the management of both materials and semi-finished products as part of the construction work, i.e. installation.
Standardization opens the way to separating work and materials
The standardization of the information contents of the design opens the way to separating work and materials - at the same time the "black box" that has arisen from the outsourcing of the manufacturing process to subcontractors. Product information, and especially article-specific information, is the information that is needed in a machine-readable form on the construction sites in terms of material flow.
The standardization of planning, procurement and supply chain information as well as construction information is a big job. We need a national division of labor and a common vision of industrial construction so that we can continue the standardization work with determination. We need a common vision of industrial construction to ensure that we are all making parts for the same system. We also need a national division of labor so that the right experts do the right part of the system, nothing is overlapped or some essential part is left undone.
Our cause is right, our victory is certain!
Term bank
- Last Planner System (LPS) = Construction production control method
- Level of Detail, LoD = Accuracy of project data in the data model
- E-BOM (Engineering Bill of Materials) = Part list of design items for the manufacturing industry
- M-BOM (Manufacturing Bill of Materials) = Part list of purchasing items for the manufacturing industry
- MRP (Manufacturing Resource Planning) = The manufacturing industry's own system for mechanical data processing
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) = Enterprise resource planning system
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