Value-Added Assessment of Construction Plans

In the purchase of a constructed facility, the buyer values those components that arc in place when the user occupies the building. An activity of placing or assembling such a component is therefore 'value-adding." This paper presents a method to classify detailed construction activities as value-adding, contributory or ineffective in order to assess the value-added by individual activities as well as assess the aggregate value-added effectiveness of an overall construction plan. Current approaches to evaluate construction operations arc based on limited examples rather than general rules. The proposed method presents a list of nine rules that are applicable to various construction trades. The paper provides examples for the value-adding classification rules, specifics how to decompose activities for value-added analysis, and presents an illustrative test case. The proposed method can assess the overall planned effectiveness of a detailed construction plan or the actual effectiveness of a construction operation. A case study of masonry wall construction indicates that the method requires significant understanding of the construction operation to classify activities properly. The use of this method for construction plan assessment enables a contractor to identity and potentially eliminate or reduce non-value-adding activity in plans as well as predict the overall value-added effectiveness of a plan.