The surprising origins of Takenaka Corporation’s recent TAKT focus; Consto and the Hammerfest general hospital in the Norwegian arctic
The construction industry is an ecosystem of many different stakeholders gradually perfecting their local ways of doing their work. Sometimes these ways may even end up as industry best practice, and influence faraway places.
Recently, our good friends at Lean Communications AS made a bit of a splash on Linkedin and in the general media in Norway after they had been in Japan to hold training sessions for takt planning and Lean Construction for the Japanese super-GC Takenaka Corporation.
A bunch of Norwegians going to Japan to teach a Japanese company about a methodology that originally was developed in Japan - by Toyota? It’s a good news story in of itself, but we would like to take this opportunity to go back to the very beginning of the story - and give some credit where it is due.
Lean Communications giving lean construction training sessions in Tokyo, Japan
If we trace the line back to the very beginning of Takenaka’s current implementation of takt planning, you find a slightly surprising starting point; Consto Region North’s (then Consto Nord AS) implementation of takt at the recently completed Hammerfest Sykehus, a 33,000 m2 hospital in the arctic north of Norway.
It was here, in Hammerfest - the world's northernmost city - that Preben Rotvold and Joachim Fornstedt, a couple of forward-thinking project managers at one of our long-time customers and partners Consto, had an inspired moment. They wanted more control over the detailed tasks and overall progress of the project and decided to implement lean principles. StreamBIM was being used in the project, and they saw the potential to expand on our checklists module to meet their needs.
We agreed with them and saw the potential for all our customers that was inherent in their suggestion, so we ended up developing the StreamBIM TAKT module in parallel with its use during construction of Hammerfest hospital.
The StreamBIM Takt Planning Module
To quote the Lean Construction Blog: “Takt planning is a scheduling method that is highly visual, shows all three types of flow, is scheduled with rhythm, continuity, and consistency (...) The format is so simple it lends itself to being highly visible. (...) the columns represent a time duration, the rows represent a Takt area, and the colored boxes represent a scope of work, or trade, or package of scopes and trades. So, each box or cell represents the visualization of time and space.”
The StreamBIM TAKT Module
The StreamBIM TAKT module allows your takt plan - and its real-time status - to be visualised in-app, both in a dashboard as well as in 2D and 3D, giving both a construction manager and a tradesperson a very hands-on tool to easily read and monitor progression.
All in all, it was a great success: the Hammerfest hospital completed four months early, in large part to the lean methodology applied.
The Japanese connection
In late 2021, the second part of the story started on the other side of the world; as Takenaka was implementing StreamBIM company-wide in Japan, they naturally came across our TAKT module, and duly enquired what it was. Rendra’s Managing Director Ole Kristian Kvarsvik showed them the basics and told them what Joachim and Consto had achieved in Hammerfest, which really piqued their interest.The result was that in November 2022, a large group of architects, engineers and construction managers from Takenaka took the 7363km long journey from Tokyo to Tromsø to see what the fuss was all about, and learn some more about lean construction from Joachim and Consto.
Joachim showing his fire to his eager students
Meeting up at the historical Rødbanken venue in a wintery Tromsø in November 2022, the setting was quite exotic for the visitors. They did get a bit distracted by the scenery, with northern lights and all, but as the picture above shows there was great interest in what Joachim had to show from how they organised their work at the Hammerfest project.
The meeting was a great success and Takenaka returned to Japan, determined to continue down the TAKT and lean construction path. Knowing them, it will be Joachim flying the other way in a few years, to learn some new TAKT tricks from his onetime visitors.
Sources: the Lean Construction Blog: - What is a takt plan?