Sunday, December 12, 2010

Calgary's Bow Tower reaches the half-way construction mark

Did a little Googling and found this from the Herald. Interesting fact, no material is on site for more than 24 hours. I can understand that, there is not a lot of spare room available at the site. And it also sounds like they have really thought about how to control the flow of labor on and off site, this is an important issue. I was recently doing some work with a company that does wood finishing for building like the Bow. Getting on site and up to the 25th floor was easy. Getting out was not so, I waited 25 minutes. The company had 8 staff on site and were effectively loosing at least 1 man-day every day waiting for the lift. Everything for the building had to go up or down one service lift, all the trades people, inspectors and material.
From the outsider it was obvious this was a system constraint and needed to be managed, which of course it was not. All the trades were expected to start the same time, times were not put aside for delivery. The lead company did not care what pain the sub contractors were under, they did care they were running late. So hours were extended but the wastes in the system, the free hours that could be solved were not looked at.

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