Efficiency in the delivery of multi-story timber buildings

The construction of wooden multi-story buildings was boosted by changes in building regulations in 2011, which allowed the use of wood in up to 8-story buildings. Thus far more than 50 wooden multi-story buildings have been built in Finland. The public sector has an important role in promoting wood-based multi-story building. Despite of intensive development, the experiences in wood-based multi-story building in Finland are still limited. Building processes may still suffer from some lacks in efficiency in terms of process management and use of resources. It may be possible to address different kinds of issues which would be able to make the process more effective and lean. The objectives of the research were 1) to find inefficiencies in multi-story timber building projects, 2) to address reason and causes for the lacks of efficiency, and 3) to make suggestions that might help to improve the lean nature of the process. The premise of this research was that some of the following reasons may cause ineffectiveness in the delivery of wood based multi-story building projects: lacks in development and standardization of structural systems, lacks in the availability of BIM software for wood buildings, specific additional building requirements set for timber buildings, inexperience of different actors with regard to multi-story timber building and current project delivery and procurement methods. The approach was to study recent literature, select two significant on-going cases which represent different structural systems, interview the representatives over the whole value chain and study the results against our hypothesis and make conclusions.