Oportunidades de melhoria no processo de projeto de arquitetura sob a perspectiva do Lean Design

Abstract

Poor project management has been identified as an important factor in reducing the overall performance of Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry projects. Lean design is a paradigm by which the design process can occur more efficiently and can be achieved with better quality results. The use of lean tools directs improvements through a structured analysis, which allows the identification of wastes and guides their reduction planning, optimizing the resources used. Lean design seems to be valid for implementation in the AEC sector, but needs to be customized according to the context of design in order to achieve the desired value for all stakeholders. The general objective of this work is, therefore, to propose improvements for the design process of buildings taking into account the perspective of lean design. In order to achieve this objective, the investigation of the process of designing buildings in architectural firms was carried out, the structure of the processes was constructed from tools based on lean design and the main wastes were identified in the design processes. The research was of the qualitative type and the research strategy was the multiple case study, with an exploratory-descriptive character. In this work, four case studies were carried out in architectural design firms. Nineteen interviews were conducted with eleven professionals. We interviewed professional members of the companies representing the strategic, tactical and operational level, directly involved in the realization of the project activities. The results demonstrate the wastes identified in the case studies as being wait, making-do and work-in-process. The proposed changes based on the identified problems focus essentially on four aspects summarized below: (1) Elaboration of structure and facilities requirements to be used as input to the architecture design definition step; (2) Planning internal waits so that they are minimized to the required amount without affecting the total project time; (3) Release the architectural design for simultaneous initiation of the projects of structure and facilities; (4) Coordination structure and MEP designs with the architecture design simultaneously in order to reduce the number of process steps. The main contributions of this work are the identification of the project process wastes, the proposed improvement opportunities for companies based on real problems identified by the case studies, and the structuring of the methodology for the application of lean diagnostic tools in the context of offices of architectural design.