Improving Construction Productivity: Implications of Even Flow production principles

Subcontracting has been widely used in order to address the high level of variability and associated risks in the complex configuration of residential construction production systems.However, the explosion of subcontracting and the parade of trades have made the construction operations very fragmented, leading to lack of predictability and adequate control on schedules and quality. The present paper proposes a set of system configurations for residential construction. On this basis, after an extensive review of the efforts to model construction production problems, several discrete event simulation models have been developed so as to assess tangible performance measures. Comparing and contrasting the results, two attributes of the system were found to be critical to yield better performance measures. In the proposed flexible system design, fewer cross-trained subcontractors undertake integrated work processes. Also, the number of houses under construction does not grow infinitely and is proportional to the system capacity.