Increased manufacturing efficiency with FlexSim and industrialized construction
Industrialized Construction + Factory Success Story
In this story, Easley & Rivers (E&R) was contracted to manufacture 624 bathroom pods for a large hospital construction project. Using manufacturing principles to increase throughput, optimize labor, and reduce risk, E&R used a popup factory to build, package, and deliver the pods to the job site for final installation.
E&R worked with ICG, a consulting firm that uses FlexSim to improve efficiency in these types of industrialized construction projects. ICG modeled the popup manufacturing process in FlexSim to test changes to the factory design, optimize the use of labor at each manufacturing stage, and implement single-piece flow principles to improve throughput. The results were a 185% increase to throughput (from around one pod per day to finishing three pods per day), a 53% reduction in labor hours per pod, and $4M in predicted savings from those labor hours.
The offsite production here will save 30,000 man-hours, and 30,000 hours equates to $2.5 million in labor alone—let alone the savings in the schedule.
Video transcript
Jim Majernik, Senior Project Manager, Easley & Rivers: Easley & Rivers were asked to build 624 prefabricated bathroom pods for a local hospital here in Pittsburgh. We’ve got 11 stations at this facility; overall, you could have as many as 100 steps in the whole process.
Ed Pazul, Superintendent, Easley & Rivers: When you build 624 bathrooms, there’s a thousand different problems that can happen. You’ll have backups in the line.
Majernik: If one aspect of this loses 15 minutes, you get to a bottleneck.
Pazul: Logistically, everything will just fall apart.
Majernik: ICG was able to help us.
Coleton Callender, Process Engineer, ICG: Easley & Rivers brought us in to help set up a line to meet the customer’s demand. We chose to use Autodesk FlexSim for its ability to illustrate and capture the future state vs. the current state. We went from a batch process to single piece flow, and we were able to model those two scenarios in FlexSim and show the results accordingly. We were able to improve from one pod a day and—with single piece flow and utilizing FlexSim to illustrate that—we were able to get to three pods a day with the future state.
Majernik: The bottleneck was the ceramic tile. ICG was able to help us with shuffling around manpower and it’s very efficient that way, there’s very little inefficiencies and downtime within the line. The offsite production here will save 30,000 man-hours, and 30,000 hours equates to $2.5 million in labor alone—let alone the savings in the schedule.
Callender: I think the most value that FlexSim brought to the whole team was buy-in from all the stakeholders. So, when there were questions about what the best method was, we were able to use FlexSim to model the current state against the future state that was being proposed—so you could see the legitimate difference between one pod versus three and what that was going to look like in reality.
Pazul: I’ve been involved in working on and managing multiple large-scale construction projects. On my best day, I can never tell you for sure I would get three done a day. Here we have produced three a day, every day, for the last 10 months.
Callender: Autodesk FlexSim was critical to this project.