Improvement Of Information Flow In The Construction Supply Chain

In automotive and manufacturing industries, Lean principle has been widely recognized and adopted with the main purpose of improving supply chain management and performance through waste reduction. Nowadays, it is applied in the construction industry as a means to improve its overall project supply chain and performance as well. However, various researches proved that merely physical waste reduction is no longer sufficient as efficient information flow is the key and lifeblood to the success in this information technology digital era. This opens up an idea that for a construction company to be competitive enough, it depends on the adoption and effective application of digitalization in construction supply chain in terms of information flow. The main objective of this paper is to achieve lean construction supply chain through digitalization of construction supply chain’s information flow. In order to achieve this, the process requires real-time information sharing among all the participants from centralized information source of the supply chain, thus, the author aims to present a theoretical digitalization process of the information flow on general contractor’s level in lieu with this idea. The digitalization of information flow is critically essential to the enhancement of the current supply chain network of the construction. When there is an increase in the effectiveness and accuracy of information transfer involved in the construction information supply chain, various costs due to errors, delays and rework are greatly reduced through the digitalization. In order to become knowledgeable of typical work process in the supply chain and to choose the appropriate value stream or process for the completion of the work models for the paper, the author conducts an on-site semi-structured interview in a building construction site in the Philippines, which serves as the case study. In addition to that, value stream mapping (VSM) is used to outline the processes, to simplify the identification of non-value activity in processes’ information flow and to prove that there is room for improvement for the chosen processes. The result not only shows that to improve the process is really needed, but also shows that it is possible to achieve lean construction supply chain through waste elimination, digitalization process and application of lean’s five principles.