Takt production and decentralized decision-making: Improving construction production flow with novel planning & control approaches

The construction industry has come under growing pressure to build increasingly complex projects and to do so more efficiently. This dissertation explored how novel approaches—takt production and decentralized decision-making—could improve production planning & control practices while increasing production ow. The dissertation employed a qualitative case study approach of three case studies, including a total of nine cases for which data were collected through 57 semi-structured interviews, observation of production and production documentation, and facilitation of takt planning sessions. Additionally, survey based social network analysis (SNA, 53 responses) and a design science research (DSR) approach with expert workshops were used to support the case study strategy. By answering the research question—"How takt production and decentralized decision-making contribute to construction production planning & control practices and production ow?"—this dissertation's primary contribution is threefold. The first contribution is providing an understanding of the effects that different takt production domains and distinct drivers have on production ow and how they support takt production implementation, which allow for the systematic reaping of the possible benefits. Takt production seems to especially promote good process ow, and the benefits increase with increased implementation maturity. The second contribution is providing an understanding of how a better balance of centralized and decentralized decision-making could support an improvement of construction PP&C practices, deliberately considering both managers' and production crews' (consisting of crew leaders and first-line workers) viewpoints. The results suggest that employing decentralization can yield benefits for project performance, along with worker performance and well-being. In addition to examining takt production and decentralized decision-making individually, the third contribution is providing an understanding of their combined effect through formulating, implementing, and validating a decentralized takt production framework. Decentralized decision-making—when involving the rst-line workers in the process—has the potential to improve the planning & control practices and complement the shortcomings of takt production, for example, by having positive effects on operations ow, even with the rst implementation efforts. Future research could consider investigating a larger range of diverse cases in an effort to examine improvement effects longitudinally; further explore the approaches through quantitative research methods to assess their impact more precisely; and further address the effects of a larger spectrum of ows, for example, project portfolio ow.