Stroytransgaz Held Strategic Session to Develop the Company’s Production System

On 16 and 17 December, Stroytransgaz held a strategic session to develop the Company’s production system. Heads of the company's production departments, representatives of contractors, suppliers and customers took part in it; totally about 40 people met at the SKA Arena construction site in Saint Petersburg. They were “levelling up” non-stop their professional skills for successful implementation of the production system into the workflow, each at their own facility, they were defining their roles, were leaning what production process losses were, were working on losses from the “case studies” of construction sites, were learning to distinguish losses from useful work, were exploring the production control and analysis tool, were learning how to see issues such as deviations from the target deadlines, were applying the tools and new skills to achieve good performance.

To recap, an innovative production system has been introduced across Stroytransgaz Group at each of the 4 MTEC construction sites and at SKA Arena. The system is designed to improve the performance and quality, reduce construction time and optimize production processes. Stroytransgaz General Director Vladimir Lavlentsev noted that implementation of the STG Production System is globally aimed at increasing performance many times and meeting the company's strategic goals to expand the project portfolio, delivering construction projects within budget, with consistently high quality and on time.

Professional experts with many years of successful experience in implementing the production system of Rosatom at large enterprises of the country, in a special Obeya room* held a working session called "Construction Process Improvement Using CWP Engineering Tools” in real time conditions at the ice arena construction site in the SKA Arena construction office. All the strategic session participants were taught to see losses, the construction site at a given instance and were taught to effectively manage operations at each site. To do this, the participants were split into small groups, which were given special cases prepared in advance, including “Installation of Steel Structures”, “Reinforcement and Installation/Dismantling of Formwork”, “Facade Installation”, “Prefabrication of Trusses, Yard for Temporary Storage of Steel Structures”, “Utilities” to identify and eliminate losses at the construction site. Any resource-consuming activity that does not add value for the customer is a loss. Losses include unorganized labour, downtime, ineffective location of capacities, overstocking, lack of materials at the right time, remedy of defects, duplication of information, and many more, which lead to increase in time, budget, poor performance, etc.

* "Obeya" in Japanese means a large room where all information about the project is displayed. The management monitors daily progress, identifies bottlenecks and makes decisions on how to eliminate them. Building a production monitoring chain from the sector to the overall construction dashboard in the obeya allows the current status to be reliably assessed, factors reducing performance identified and issues fixed, and decision-making sped up as much as possible.

They identified such operational losses as overproduction, excessive movements, unnecessary transportation, overstocking, overprocessing, waiting, rework/defects, system problems such as no shift job, etc. The identified losses were analyzed, a rating of bottlenecks was made and an action plan was drawn up with solutions indicating action owners and deadlines. Representatives of each group presented solutions to the bottlenecks identified.

During the strategic session, the following skills were acquired and levelled up: identifying losses and their sources, displaying each stage of materials and information flow, developing a shared terminology for all participants in the process, making the right management decisions to optimize the workflow.

In addition to main - construction - tasks, Stroytransgaz Production System, for example, will also improve the work of office staff, including the administrative assistant, spokesperson and HR department. Anything that requires some kind of optimization can be improved by the STG production system.

Various tools that are used at large enterprises were shown, including the 5S System, a workspace organization system that ensures safe and efficient work. They showed and talked in practical terms about planning of work on the system through generation of weekly-daily and shift jobs. They explained how to manage project milestone monitoring in the “Plan-Actual-Deviation” format with mandatory recording of the physical quantities performed. For each month, at least one key event from the work schedule is provided for and aimed at achieving a milestone. This system is visualised. At the stands in obeya, the construction progress trend is visible and clear, all deviations are highlighted and the forecast for achievement of target indicators is monitored.

Summing up at the end of the working session, Vladimir Lavlentsev said, “Until this spring, we were barely beyond the breakeven point. Where have we got to? This very obeya. It is just a way of life to me. When you are approaching an arrow of key events, see where you are, what has been done during the week, and the plan for the next week, the reason for the delay, then you analyze all losses in-depth and come up with correction actions. There is something to work on here and much more yet to be done. I am proud of having such obeya. We have all sections for this project broken down till commissioning. We can look retrospectively at where we are and what we need to do today to reach our goal."

The result of the implementation of the Stroytransgaz Production System should be the transformation of construction sites into locations with a very high level of production culture, where safety is the highest priority, where people know how to identify losses and quickly eliminate them, where people listen and hear various proposals for improving production processes.

A new stage of forward movement starts with a view to maintain leadership in the highly competitive construction market. Stroytransgaz has an impeccable 30 years’ track record. Now, more than ever, it is important to constantly improve by keeping the best traditions and to develop according to new requirements of today. Implementation of an innovative production system is a new era. This will give impetus to the next stage of the company's development. Therefore, at this stage of development, it is important to work as one team by helping each other and demonstrating the best professional qualities and use the best practices of major corporations. The system should combine the services implemented in the company, bring fresh ideas and developments and encourage the team for new aspirations and achievements.