Relationship Between Time Spent in Production Work Activities and Production Workspaces.

The study presented in this paper is part of an ongoing research project that addresses the absence of established procedures for automatically measuring the distribution of time workers spend on Value-adding (VA) activities. To understand the relationship between workers’ time spent on VA activities and VA workspaces, the activities conducted by a carpenter trade were studied during the realization of a Case Study on a renovation building project. The carpenters were divided into three groups regarding the activities that they conducted: interior, façade, and roof activities. The authors used two sources of evidence to compare the time that workers spent in production work categories and workspaces: (1) the work sampling technique to obtain time spent in work categories and (2) smartwatches to collect time spent in different workspaces. The authors used geographic data points provided by smartwatches worn by the carpenter trade to collect their location within the job site and developed a Python script to automatically group the data points into workspaces. Correlation analysis reveals a strong correlation (R2=0.2473) and very strong correlation (R2=0.7886) between time spent in VA workspaces and time spent on VA activities when the workers worked on interior and exterior activities, respectively.