'Lean' construction methods let tower rise fast in downtown Orlando

A crew works quickly to smooth out wet concrete that has just… (Stephen M. Dowell, Orlando…)

March 10, 2013 | By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel

That new apartment tower going up near the county courthouse in downtown Orlando is growing so quickly, it's as if Jack buried a bean there and a concrete stalk sprouted.

The tower's builder, Batson-Cook Co. isn't pushing workers to rush; the job has gone quickly because of something called the "Lean" method, which is dedicated to ridding the construction process of waste, especially wasted time. Work schedules have been drawn so that nobody is left waiting on someone else.

"There are a lot of people who say you can't do that," said Randy Thompson, Batson-Cook executive vice president. "Well, you can, and it works great."

At a height of 249 feet, 8 inches, SkyHouse will become downtown's 11 t h -tallest building, according to the building-data service Emporis GmbH. People who live or work near the city center have marveled at how quickly the tower at Rosalind Avenue and Livingston Street has risen since the start of construction in September; the structure already sports a lot of its glass skin.

Of course, there hasn't been anything to compare it with in quite a while: the $63 million SkyHouse is the first downtown high-rise to be built since before the Great Recession.

In the years since then, a revamped approach to construction — the Lean method — has been taking root in the nation and is now apparent in Orlando, at both SkyHouse and another big local project. Boiled down, it's about being better, faster and cheaper.

Georgia-based Batson-Cook, owned since 2008 by a big Japanese company, Kajima, is adhering to concepts drawn generally from automobile manufacturing and specifically from Toyota Motor Corp.'s obsession with eliminating "muda" — or waste of motion, material and time — using the "Lean" method.

A more conventional approach was used to build SkyHouse's foundation, which consists of 300 piers, each made by drilling a 75-foot-deep hole and filling it with concrete.

But the tower's rapid rise from those piers is the result of well-oiled pattern of repetition made possible by dividing the job into smaller-than-ordinary bites.

The typical way to construct such a tower would have been to complete each 15,000-square-foot floor before starting on the next one, said Curt Rigney, a Batson-Cook project executive. Workers would erect floor forms, lay out reinforcement steel, and set up the initial wiring and plumbing fittings, which would take four days to complete. The floor's concrete would be poured and finished on the fifth day.

The waste in that, Rigney said, is that the concrete finishers are idle for the first four days, while the forms, steel and utilities crews are idle on the fifth day.

At SkyHouse, each floor is divided into three sections of 5,000 square feet each. Starting early each day, the forms, steel and utilities workers prepare one of the sections for a concrete pour that occurs late in the afternoon, when about 17 concrete trucks snake their way to the job along city streets.

With that approach, "workers do the same thing every day at the same time," Rigney said.

It's more complex than that; several sections are in various stages of progress on any given day. But the result is that the basic structure of each floor is completed in three days, not five.

By taking smaller bites of work, crews are in constant motion and constantly on each other's heels. "Waiting is 'muda,'¿" Rigney said.

Ideally, another result of such tight turnover is improved quality. Because the job is an endless loop, in which every crew is quickly followed by another crew, it becomes clear who ran late and made a mess, and whose work was on time and spot-on.

"This is pretty intense," said Tim Archbold, a 25-year construction worker, who operated an enormous boom Thursday evening that belched out a 5,000-square-foot, 7-inch-deep layer of concrete, covering a dense maze of steel bars, cables, wiring and plumbing that wasn't here 12 hours earlier.

Carl Giovenco, a Batson-Cook project manager, watched the rubber-booted ballet of a few dozen workers lay down that 170 cubic yards of concrete. There was little talking, much less shouting.

"This is going off without a hitch," he said.

The Lean approach, by cutting construction time, reduces costs and allows a building to begin generating income sooner. Batson-Cook said it expects SkyHouse to be finished months sooner and millions of dollars cheaper than a conventionally built tower, though the company did not provide exact numbers.

Each SkyHouse floor will contain 16 apartments, with rents of about $1,100 for a studio, $1,300 for a one-bedroom and $2,000 for a two-bedroom — all with granite counters, wood floors and floor-to-ceiling windows.