Towards Production Control on Multi-Story Building Construction Sites

This paper reports a construction site intervention that is part of a research program devoted to the topic of production control in multi-story building construction. An early work by the authors introduced a preplanning method using the line of balance technique. This present work aggregates some tools previously used such as the Last Planner and Lookahead planning in order to develop a production control on site. The paper describes the application of site production control sub-system on a multi-story building construction site. The various steps used to implement the system are briefly described. The tools used by the crew were simple spreadsheets during the first phase and production cards (kanban) associated with some control charts derived from JIT and line of balance techniques. Information was managed using electronic spreadsheets. This work shows that production planning and control can be effectively implemented on construction sites, using very simple tools. These facts are in accord with the authors’ conviction that a lasting lean construction change in the construction industry will be from the bottom up.