Construction Operation Engineering

The history of construction operation engineering and construction operation analysis can be traced back to the work of Frederick W. Taylor, a man known as the father of scientific management.  As the story goes, Taylor once observed five bricklayers laying brick and then sought out the project superintendent to exclaim to him that all five were laying bricks differently.  “So what!” the superintendent responded.  “Well,” Taylor said, “ if one of them is doing it right the other four are doing it wrong!”  And that is how operation engineering and analysis began.

Taylor eventually concentrated his studies to the manufacturing industry and introduced the concept of timing workers activities with stop watches and developed the concept known as “time and motion” studies. In 1911 he published The Principles of Scientific Management, which really established the beginnings of what is now known as Industrial Engineering.  While the early work of Taylor revealed huge opportunity for productivity improvement, many workers objected to the intrusion of his work and the standards his calculations set.

In 1914, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, a couple that had become strong believers in Taylor’s work formed their own productivity analysis consulting company and began to proclaim the need for worker satisfaction and the need for ergonomics in the work place. Frank Gilbreth began the use of still pictures and crude film clips to capture worker movement in an attempt to better understand and analyze productivity. The work of the Gilbreths had a huge impact on the manufacturing industry and radically expanded and improved on the work of Taylor.  All the while, virtually none of their learning was migrating to the construction industry, where a craft production model, in which the craftsmen in the crew determined the methods with which they performed their work, was deeply entrenched. 

Then in the 60’s, Henry Parker and Clark Oglesby, two civil engineers and Stanford University professors that founded the first ever Construction Management major, began to experiment with newly developed Time-lapse filming and projection equipment to study construction operations using those early concepts developed by Taylor and Gilbreth. They began to explore ways to capture and present information depicting the movement and utilization of craftsmen, materials and equipment within many conventional construction operations. In 1969, the Hensel Phelps Construction Company purchased a package of Timelapse equipment from Professor Parker and began to analyze their construction operations.

In 1972, Parker and Oglesby published their book, Methods Improvement for Construction Managers, and it quickly became the handbook for students of construction methods improvement.  In that book, Parker and Oglesby described their experiences to date with improving construction operations and dedicated much of he book to the aspects of the human factors of construction work and the need for a serious approach to ensuring the safety of the construction workforce. In the meantime, Al Burkhart, of the Hensel Phelps Construction Company, was making great progress in developing a “Production Analysis” department using Timelapse filming and analysis techniques while growing a very impressive collection of method improvement successes and retained learning library.

Then in the late seventies Mike Casten of Construction Concepts and Greg Howell of Howell Associates began to team up to provide methods improvement consulting to the construction industry.  They too began to develop a very impressive collection of major operation improvements and enhanced the analysis methods of Parker and Oglesby. 

For the last thirty years Construction Concepts has continued to expand and improve on the work of these early pioneers and that of Joseph Juran, who first wrote about the need for creating lasting breakthroughs in performance and the need for purposive discovery of the constraints to efficiency. We have grown those early concepts into a complete package of operation engineering and design, analysis and reengineering that is now recognized as a valuable project engineering discipline that is common on many of our clients’ projects.  Along the way we developed three operation-specific concepts we call Operation Genetics, Operation Ergonomics and Operation Economics and have incorporated them a whole new level of construction operation engineering and design that we call Engineered Potential Production Solutions.

We now consider Operation Engineering and the skills required to develop Engineered Potential Production Solutions a vital discipline to be used routinely by project engineers as they provide operation engineering and design support to their project leadership and foremen. We have watched with great pleasure as accomplished Operation Engineers carry that discipline with him or her as they work their way up the organization chart and provide leadership with a solid understanding of operations in ways many project leaders simply never had the opportunity to develop.

Using these latest purposive discovery and operation engineering concepts, a detailed examination of the average construction operation today reveals an alarming amount of wasted effort, time and resources even among those operations that are achieving estimated production rates and durations.  It is this waste and inefficiency that will simply go unnoticed or appreciated within a conventional project environment in which output measures such as cost reports and routine casual observation of the work in the field are the standard way of evaluating the work art the crew level. Unfortunately most operations have the potential for significant improvement but these opportunities go undetected, even though they are right under the nose of project leadership.

It is this undetected opportunity that must be first exposed before any construction organization can become truly energized in the pursuit of productivity improvement and performance enhancement. That was true in 1972 when the Parker-Oglesby book came out and it is still true today

The following material briefly describes our approach to operation analysis using two mental models.  The first we call the Construction Operation Input/Process/Output Model. It provides a simple mental model to be used as on ongoing operation is analyzed or a new operation is being envisioned and anticipated. The second is the Construction Operation Life Cycle.  This is a model that we have developed over the last fifteen years to depict the cyclical process of designing incredibly safe, effective, efficient and profitable construction operations that produce a high quality product and ensure high worker satisfaction and sound ergonomics. 

The graphic below is the Construction Operation Input/Process/Output Model.  It depicts the inputs to a typical construction operation coming into a work area in which the assembly inputs will be installed or transformed using a process of some sort that will create an out put that must meet the needs of both the downstream internal customer operation as well as the expectations of the external customer.

The most basic examination of an operation is Observation, in which safety or risk hazards are identified and immediately act on and idle or straining resources are identified.  Next comes Evaluation.  Evaluation is the process of examining work activities with a prescribed set of evaluation criteria. Regardless of the planned process to be employed by the crew, the quality and reliability of the inputs the crew receives and the physical nature of the work area in which the work will be done will seriously impact the process.

Since the crew has little if any control over these two critical components of the overall process, there is little reason to evaluate methods or process until the inputs are of the required quality and reliability and the work area meets a set of Minimum Workarea Requirements. Thus Evaluation starts with evaluating inputs and work area characteristics.    

Then the work process itself can be evaluated for the amount of time value adding work is occurring, know as Percent Value Added (PVA) and the types of waste observed as the work is performed.  Additionally the process is evaluated against Operation Genetics and Operation Ergonomic criteria. 

The next level of purposive discovery is that of  Documentation, in which the way work moves through space and time is documented in ever increasing levels of detail.  Using pictures, video, sketches and measurements the flow of resources and material is documented and step and cycle times of the process are captured.

Finally, the entire operation is subjected to detailed Analysis. It is within the Analysis process that the Short Step Delay Free (SSDF) cycle time is determined, a combination of reengineering and operation economics analysis are explored and potential revenue enhancement calculated, Net Daily Potential Production is determined and the myriad MakeCertain! tasks required to achieve the calculated potential rate of production are developed and assigned.  All this effort results in a radically redesigned and highly engineered operation production plan, an Engineered Potential Production Solution.

This above is a very brief description of the start of a solid Operation Engineering discipline.  Over time the learning that comes from the process just described reveals the need for interaction and collaboration with the workforce, the need for better initial planning and implementation.  Ultimately, this discipline we call Operation engineering becomes a never-ending cycle of Continuous Improvement and Compounding Learning 

We call this cyclical process the Construction Operation Lifecycle. Over the years we have developed a relatively simple model for depicting the engineering a potential production solution for upcoming operations and reengineering ongoing operations.  This process consistently enables project teams to routinely create operations that run at two or three times estimated production rates while experiencing an extremely steep “learning curve”.  The Construction Operation Life Cycle is shown below.

We now offer services in the area of Operation Engineering that range from facilitation of the initial design or reengineering of a single “critical” operation to the delivery of programmed teaching and guided experiential learning that leads to the growth of internal client Operation Engineers capable of providing high quality operation design and reengineering services to their project teams as they implement operations of all sizes and complexity.

(See our Workshops and Institutes section for descriptions of our approach to training and learning.)

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