AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The industrialization of construction work is one of the ways it is possible to achieve better quality and productivity in this competitive environment. However, in order to improve efficiency using industrialized technologies is not enough. There is a need to improve planning and control systems. Although the Last Planner System has been developed for the construction environment, since it was devised the successful results promoted its implementation in different production environments. Regarding lean production implementations, the system has been pointed out as a starting point for a company to achieve the basic stability. This study is focused in one type of industrialized production system: the engineer-to-order. By industrialized, it is the prefabrication that has been addressed. In these kinds of production systems, there is a need to integrate the prefabrication plant with the construction site needs. This research project aims to develop an integrated planning and control production planning and control model for ETO prefabricated systems, integrating design, manufacturing and site assembly. The research is part of a partnership with a steel fabricator company (Company A) that was interested in improving its production planning system. The research method is grounded in the design science research, in which there is an effort from the researcher to develop an artefact as an output of the research process, in this case, a planning and control model. The implementation adopted some strategies from the action-research, so some solutions needed to be collectively constructed between the researcher and the practitioners, in order to have an effective use in the organization. Following this strategy, it is possible to have same learning cycles during the implementation of the solutions, which are continually assessed and adapted in order to improve the processes analysed. The results are divided into four phases of implementation. In the first step the main effort was in consolidating an integrated planning and control process for the short-term in the production units. In the second step the focus was the overall system, mainly providing mechanisms to collect the status of all construction sites for the plant. The barriers to improve this feedback process brought to light the need for using visual management tools. This development concerned the third step of implementation, further improving the changes made in the previous phases. The fourth step was based on the analysis of the logistics processes, as the interface between the plant and site assembly. After the main empirical study on Company A, two studies were carried out abroad in order to understand a different context of ETO production systems. The first concerns a mechanical contractor situated in a high complex project. In this study, it was possible to develop some planning tools to facilitate the analysis between the fabrication and site installation of the products. The second concerns a steel fabricator focused on the structural system. This was… Advisors/Committee Members: Formoso, Carlos Torres.