TY  - CONF
TI  - Product and Process Complexity in Construction: An Exploratory Study Using Bill-of-Materials (Bom)
C1  - Lille, France
C3  - Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC31)
SP  - 711
EP  - 722
PY  - 2023
DO  - 10.24928/2023/0120
AU  - Zani, Carolina Melecardi
AU  - Rocha, Cecilia Gravina da
AD  - PhD Student, Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT,  UK. carolina.zani.21@ucl.ac.uk ORCID 0000-0002-2649-2432
AD  -  Senior Lecturer, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), City  Campus, Broadway, Bldg 11, Lv 11, NSW 2007, Australia. cecilia.rocha@uts.edu.au ORCID 0000-0001-6764- 1724  
AB  - Modularity has been applied in the automotive and computer industries to simplify production and supply chain management. Instead of coping with dozens of hundreds of parts, these are grouped into modules produced and delivered by suppliers, simplifying products assembly. Bill-of-Materials (BOM) is a technique used in manufacturing to map the modules that form a product at distinct hierarchical levels. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, such technique has not been widely explored in construction to assess the complexity involved in buildings production. This paper uses BOM in an empirical case (a house of approximately 400 square meters built in Southeast region of Brazil) to analyse (i) the total number of different modules forming a building and (ii) how these modules are distributed throughout the work packages for producing such building. The results show that the studied house is formed by (at least) 522 different modules, which are unevenly distributed across 18 work packages. Some work packages (e.g. concrete pillars and walls) have more than 200 modules whereas others (e.g. foundations) have less than 10. This suggests the potential for repackaging and organizing the delivery of modules as kits to ease production tasks. 
KW  - Complexity
KW  - modularity
KW  - modules
KW  - work packages
KW  - work structuring
PB  - 
T2  - Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC31)
DA  - 2023/06/26
CY  - Lille, France
L1  - http://iglc.net/Papers/Details/2064/pdf
L2  - http://iglc.net/Papers/Details/2064
N1  - Export Date: 19 April 2025
DB  - IGLC.net
DP  - IGLC
LA  - English
ER  -