Critical events in construction process

Function failures, defects and poor communication are major problems in the construction industry. These failures and defects are caused by a row of critical events in the construction process. The purpose of this paper is to define critical events in the construction process and to investigate cause-effects of failures and defects in the construction industry by using an analytical approach (The bowtie model) which is developed in the accident research. Using this model clarifies the relationships within the chain of failures that causes critical events with undesirable consequences. In this way the causes of failures and the relationships between various failures are rendered visible. A large construction site was observed from start to finish as the empirical element in the research. The research focuses on all kinds of critical events identified throughout every phase during the building process and includes all participants in the construction project. A general result from the analysis was that critical events that occurred when the site was not using Lean Construction evolved much longer than critical events that occurred in the period when Lean Construction was used. Another result was the usefulness of the analytical model for visualising the cause-effect of failures and defects in construction.