Value-added assessment of construction plans

In the purchase of a constructed facility, the buyer values those components that are in place when the user occupies the building. A task of placing or assembling such a component is therefore 'value-adding' (VA). This paper presents a method to classify construction tasks as VA, contributory, or ineffective to assess the valued-added by individual activities, as well as the aggregate value-added effectiveness of the construction plan. Current approaches to evaluate construction operations are based on limited examples rather than general rules. The proposed method presents a list of nine rules that are applicable to various construction trades. This paper provides for the value-added classification rules, specifies how to decompose activities for value-added analysis, and presents an illustrative test case. The proposed method can be used to assess the overall planned effectiveness of a detailed construction plan or the actual effectiveness of a construction operation. A case study of masonry wall construction indicates that the method requires significant understanding of the evaluated operation and task precedence relationships to classify activities properly. The use of this method for construction plan assessment enables a contractor to identify and potentially eliminate or reduce non-VA tasks, as well as predict the value-added effectiveness of a plan.