Abstract
Formwork material and payroll are among the greatest costs in building reinforced concrete structures. Therefore, formwork engineering is a key factor affecting project success. Traditional formwork construction entails non-value-adding activities resulting in waste. The objective of this study is to adapt lean manufacturing techniques to formwork engineering in a bid to reduce waste, specifically by developing a lean formwork construction model. In the model, andon is used to establish an on-site quality control culture, allowing form workers to obtain assistance immediately whenever a problem occurs. In addition, formwork operations are pulled through the kanban system to reduce mould inventory and achieve continuous construction flow. A case study is used to validate the applicability of the proposed model. Results show that the proposed model can effectively reduce waste in the formwork construction flow and increase the value of operations, thus providing a new approach to improving formwork engineering.
Highlights
Formwork payroll and material costs account for approximately 15% of the construction cost and 1/3 of the structure costs for reinforced concrete construction (Peng 1991, 1992)
This study develops a formwork for an andon culture based on the particular characteristics of formwork
This paper presents an actual construction case from Taiwan to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed lean formwork construction model
Summary
Formwork payroll and material costs account for approximately 15% of the construction cost and 1/3 of the structure costs for reinforced concrete construction (Peng 1991, 1992). The formwork construction flows entail wasteful non-value-adding operations and motions (Ko et al 2011). According to Peng (1998), workers assembling and machining formworks spend 13.5% of their total time “walking and searching for moulds” and 22.1% on “searching for required materials from disordered moulds.”. Ohno defined waste as any activity which fails to comply with the standard efficiency of the production system and does not create value in either the production line or product development flow. The main structure has four stories and one basement level, with a total floor of 2185.3 square meters. The formwork area in the second floor totals 1646 square meters, and is accomplished using wooden moulds, wooden supports, steel tube supports, and shaped steel. Data were collected on site, with worker-hours averaged over a one month period of observation
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