Gaston Electrical transforms prefab shop with help from Haley & Aldrich construction manufacturing consultants

Client challenge

For more than 80 years, New England–based Gaston Electrical has prided itself on delivering best-in-class electrical construction services. To continue delivering on this mission, the company aimed to adopt more efficient, cost-effective prefab construction manufacturing methods.

Gaston started a prefab shop in 2014, which indeed saved time and money for customers and the business. But Gaston’s people knew that they could do more to internalize the shift from traditional to prefab construction manufacturing methods in the shop, and that they needed expert help to get there.

So they brought in Haley & Aldrich’s construction manufacturing consultants, who have a proven track record of transforming companies through a Lean-centered approach to construction manufacturing.

Our approach

Using our Industrialized Construction Maturity Assessment, the Haley & Aldrich team evaluated Gaston’s existing shop facilities, training methods, and processes. They then customized a plan that would help Gaston meet its goals—which included tripling the amount of work delivered prefab within five years—using our Construction Manufacturing System approach.

Our team worked closely with Gaston’s pre-apprentice workforce, the prefab shop foreman, managers, and senior leadership to understand their perspectives and help them identify immediate opportunities for improvement, then begin the shift from construction mindset to a manufacturing mindset. This included:

• Examining product lines to identify opportunities for standardization and develop standard work instructions to increase efficiency, consistent quality, and accelerate pre-apprentice learning.
• Reconfiguring workspaces to increase efficiency, improve flow, and work cell ergonomics.
• Establishing a production planning process, which impacted jobsite planning to enable smaller batches, improved flow and better signals between the shop and the field.
• Increasing communication between the shop and job sites, which included bringing workers from sites into the shop and vice versa. These exchanges helped everyone understand the possibilities of prefab and the real-world requirements for products.
• Integrating workflows with the company’s supply chain, simplifying an email-based ordering process into a one-click web form hosted by the supplier.

Woven throughout these changes was perhaps the most important shift for long-term adoption: changing staff mindset. We empowered Gaston’s shop workers to see possibilities for improvement and share insights with other teams. They also took the initiative to create a Lean orientation program to train new hires, and the shop has become a model for others looking to successfully integrate construction manufacturing principles.

Value delivered

• Increased the shop’s productivity by 40% through improved planning and communication, as well as by reorganizing the existing shop floor to double the amount of workspace.
• Helped Gaston exceed production targets on every assembly currently in the shop.
• Increased standard assemblies by 30% and laid the groundwork to expand prefab delivery of more products.
• Simplified processes and documented them in easy-to-digest materials, helping employees at all levels internalize Lean principles.

“Eleven weeks of work with [the Haley & Aldrich] team has transformed our shop more than we have done ourselves in the past six years. I’ve never been so excited to learn that everything we are doing is wrong.” 

– Gaston Field Operations Leader Tim Reen