An investigation to improve construction information flows

A construction project is an information-driven business. From conception to completion, ideas are created, decisions are made and thousands of pieces of information are transferred among project members. The inception and completion of the contractor's tasks rely on complete and prompt responses to related information from the design team. The primary objective of this research is to explore opportunities to improve the information flow in a construction project. Requests for Information (RFI) and submittal processes are selected because they have been commonly used in the construction industry as major vehicles by which to deliver information among project team members and because they are closely related to on-site production. From the contractor's perspective, late response and large variations in information processing time can cause late and unreliable inception and completion of tasks while, from the owner's perspective, they can cause not only disputes and legal claims but also the ultimate failure of the construction project. As a customer who intensively uses RFI and submittal processes, contractors demand prompt and predictable responses from the design team. However, the reality is that on-time response rates are low and variations between the lead times contractors want and actual lead times are large. The study selects three different projects, assesses their process capabilities and develops a series of practical improvement strategies by identifying root causes at the production-flow level. The study demonstrates that performance prediction models reveal a large gap between the demands of the contractor and those of the design team. The study also makes a use of process capability analysis as another assessment to show that the current process is not fully capable of meeting contractors' expectations. Finally, the study develops a graphical performance indicator by employing the process flow concept and suggests how to improve flow performance by addressing factors identified from the qualitative root cause analysis. The context of this dissertation may not be specific because the selected cases may not represent the entire information process of the construction industry. However, the research demonstrates that information flow can be improved by employing new concepts such as Lean and Six Sigma.