Towards improving productivity on refurbishment projects

Objectives: Refurbishment projects have shown a negative productivity development in the last decades. Several national and international research project on sustainable refurbishment has been initiated in the last decade. However, few of this pay much attention to the construction management's contribution to sustainability. In the REVALUE research project, one aim was to enhance the scientific body of knowledge on the subject and create a productivity baseline on refurbishment projects. Further, it evaluated the productivity potential inherent in the refurbishment processes.Methods: A refurbishment case study was selected, and data was collected through a work sampling study, comprising to more than 2,200 data point. A lean perspective was adopted to estimate the share of time, a construction crew spends on value adding and non-value adding activities. The crew installs pre-constructed lightweight facade modules on the refurbishment case.Results: The data analysis showed that 31% of the time was spent on production, and 69% of the time was spent on non-value adding activities. The analysis combined with observations on-site documented potential improvements using the lean tools 5S, Kanban, 5 times why and Value Stream Mapping. In total, it was possible to reduce waste 12% and to increase productivity 27%.Conclusion: The impact was a relative reduction of 8% in direct labor costs for the contractor, which equals a 1% reduction in client costs. Thus, the potential gain from increasing productivity is relatively higher for the contractor than for the client. The process showed an improvement potential, and change in the current distribution resulting in relatively large productivity increases. The baseline created here can be used to evaluate interventions effect on productivity in refurbishment projects.