Improving Handing Over of Residential Units Using Lean Tools

Construction projects are known to be customer-centric. Traditionally, there is a process of intermittent handing over of the dwelling units in any residential project across various stakeholders. This alternating cycle of handing over and taking over (HO-TO) leads to time wastage and creation of contractual issues such as DLP duration and cost claims and affects the adjacent ongoing activities due to resource re-allocation. This cycle can be optimized with bringing all the stakeholders working according to a comprehensive work schedule, thus streamlining the interdependence. The project under study is a residential project with more than 3600 dwelling units to be constructed and handed over to the end-customer over a period of 4 years. The project team devised an efficient way of collaborative planning system for handing over of flat units. The collaboration and the dynamic project planning facilitated the teams to hand over the residential units to the customers at an exceptional monthly rate of 211 units with an approximate improvement of about 40%. Implementation of Lean tools such as Big Rooms, PPC, constraint analysis, root-cause analysis and other site-based micro-level monitoring techniques have resulted in a significant improvement in the monthly rate of handing over.