The production of pre-fabricated concrete structures for commercial and industrial buildings usually consist of large projects, and the assembly process has a low degree of complexity, if analyzed individually. However, when the whole production system is considered, those projects have a high degree of complexity, due to the large number of interdependences, the variability of the assembly process on site, and also the need of managing multiple projects simultaneously. The design process has much influence in downstream processes, and may cause some problems that are typical of this type of production system, such as: inventory of parts in the construction site waiting to be assembled, work-in-progress of partially assembled structures, and delays in the delivery of parts by the manufacturing plant. One of the possible ways of reducing work-in-progress and the lead-time of parts is the reduction of design batch size. This article presents the results of the implementation of the principle of continuous flow in design, based on the reduction of the batch size in the design of pre-fabricated concrete structures. Action-research was the research strategy adopted in this investigation, and two empirical studies were carried out in projects from the same company. The results indicate that the reduction of batch size has contributed to improve the integration of the three project stages (design, pre-fabrication, and assembly).
Design; Continuous flow; Valu Stream Mapping; Reduction of batch size
