Study on Flow Improvement of Brick Laying Operations in a Residential Construction Project

Construction has been acknowledged as a production process with much inefficiency related to various generated wastes during the process. Lean construction initiative is attempting to mitigate this problem by reducing waste generating processes and, on the other hand, trying to increase the value the customer needs. There have been many successful applications of the lean construction principles in many countries that encourage the adoption of the principles in Indonesia. One of the efforts in implementing one of the lean construction principles in the Indonesia construction industry was conducted in an action research and is reported in this paper. The research was aiming to implement flow improvement approaches to reduce the waste in a three-unit residential construction project, and focusing only on brick laying operations of three different materials for three different houses: clay brick, concrete brick, and light-weight brick. Durations, sequences, and resources related to each task in each operation were collected using a video camera to calculate their performances such as productivities, idleness of resources, and cycle times during the beginning phase of the operations and then considered as existing conditions. Based on existing performances, especially related to non-productive activities, analyses and recommendations were made to improve the flow of each brick laying operation. The recommendations were then implemented to the next phase of all three operations, and resulted in reduced waste, potentially better productivity, cycle time, and labor utilization factors of those three brick laying operations.