Applicability of continuous improvements in industrialised construction design process

Abstract: The construction design phase is currently the most time consuming part of the industrialised construction process and the bottleneck for further streamlining the process at most industrialised construction companies in Sweden. One explanation is that every construction design project is considered as something new and unique, wherefore use of experiences to promote continuous improvement is limited (Meiling 2008). Höök (2006) argues that industrialised construction companies have the potential to progressively extract experiences from projects and incorporate them as knowledge into standardised processes. Improved performance is of interest for every company, since high performance implies high competitiveness, which in turn gives high profit. Slack et al. (2004) state that any operation, regardless of how well managed, still have the potential to be further improved.The aim of the research is to investigate the applicability of continuous improvement to the industrialised construction design process.Empirical data has been collected in two case studies and one survey , which has resulted in three appended papers with focus on: construction design organisation, performance measurements, and the building system as a strategic asset. Each paper contributes to the comprehensive aim, but focuses on various aspects of the construction design process.The results show that having a rigid organisation, with the same personnel from one project to another, is favourable when working with continuous improvements. The current performance measure is not considered to support continuous improvement work, as comparison across different project-types is difficult. It is also impossible to determine the effect of improvement initiatives using total time spent as a performance measure. The results also show that the documentation of the building system is limited wherefore the building system cannot serve as a bearer of information, which is obstructing work with continuous improvements. The general conclusion is that continuous improvements are considered applicable to industrialised construction design process with minor restrictions in terms of better documentation of the building system and adapted performance measurements.