Resilience, industry growth put FPD plants on fast track
08/01/2007
Faster, bigger, better, thriftier: these are the drivers that have relentlessly shaped Taiwan’s reputation in manufacturing over the years. Just as the world has come to associate Antwerp with diamonds, Persia with rugs, and the American plains with amber waves of grain, Taiwan brings to mind limitless economic manufacturing capacity.
In recent years, the microelectronics and flat panel industries in particular have contributed impressively to Taiwan’s high-tech construction pedigree. Both of these industries have amassed clusters of production capacity in Taiwan. Both also share the characteristics of intense competition and rapid technology evolution, factors that perpetuate the demand for accelerated delivery of high-tech factories.
Need for speed
Fast-track construction is nothing new to the Asian high-technology scene, but the pace of fast-track delivery for major construction projects has continued to intensify. A primary reason for this phenomenon is competition. For example, in 2004, all but one of Taiwan’s major liquid crystal display (LCD) flat panel companies-the so-called “Five Tigers”-lost money.
As is the case in many past emerging industries, these leading manufacturers are willing to absorb financial losses in order to seize a larger market share using lower price as a driver. Manufacturers are banking on their ability to get product to market faster and achieve greater economies of production scale than their competitors are able-and speed of construction is fundamental to that formula.
A key advantage that fast-track high-technology projects have traditionally enjoyed in Taiwan is a large supply of affordable labor. This situation is reminiscent of the US construction culture in earlier times, when there was a direct correlation between the aggressiveness of project schedules and the headcount of workers at the job site. An extreme example is the Hoover Dam, whose 21,000 workers (with sometimes more than 5000 on the site per day) achieved a schedule many thought impossible. Housing near the dam’s project site was provided, which was a bonus to the hordes of workers eager to work their way out of The Great Depression.
Similarly, a reliable way to get work done faster in Taiwan has been to apply more labor, often with worker housing provided. However, in the last few years, Asia’s economic boom has created shortages in a Taiwanese workforce once thought limitless. This is one phenomenon that has forced high-tech Taiwanese construction projects to focus on new strategies to improve construction site efficiencies instead of adding more workers.
The ability to improve efficiencies is even more critical as the physical scale of Taiwanese high-tech projects has grown. In the last two years, new, latest-generation flat panel plants in Taiwan have ranked as among the world’s largest buildings. Extraordinary logistical controls are required to deliver such massive structures, some comprising millions of square feet, on a fast-track basis.
One recent flat panel project required that 87,300 tons of structural steel be erected in just 2.5 months, which translates to an incredible average of more than 1000 tons/day. Another project required 19,000 metric tons of steel, 30,500 metric tons of rebar, and 198,800 cubic meters of concrete (Fig. 1). With projects of such gargantuan size, even issues as basic as coordination of materials delivery and storage of construction materials in laydown areas on a construction site can become formidable challenges.
Another Taiwan project required 6600 trucks to deliver 72,000 cubic meters of concrete to a construction site, which if delivered all at once would have formed a line of vehicles almost 50 miles long (Fig. 2). “One of the things we had fun with was how they would get these trucks into the site,” recalls the project manager. “If you lined all those trucks up bumper to bumper, they would go from Hsinchu all the way back to Taipei….”
Fortunately for owners and their contractors, local Taiwanese authorities are willing to provide special accommodations in such extreme cases, such as closing major roads at night to enable the transport of large quantities of construction materials during low-traffic hours.
Despite some cases of labor shortages, the pressures of fast-track schedules, and the imposing scale of latest-generation projects, the Taiwan construction community has proven adaptable to change and determined to retain its status as a high-tech hub.
Safety
While there may be a perception that parts of Asia may be less demanding when it comes to construction safety, owners can find encouragement in the fact that excellent safety statistics are being compiled on many large Taiwanese construction projects, including those involving fast-track schedules posing inherently higher risk. Investors in Taiwan are confident enough of their ability to build safe that they are able to impose safety expectations as rigorous as those they would apply anywhere in the world.
Some contractors develop health, safety, and environmental programs tailored to Taiwanese conditions. Specific safety plans are then further customized to an individual site’s unique conditions. Some of the key features of such safety programs include:
- Contract conditions. Contract language should clearly define the limits of safety responsibilities for all participants on a project site. Owners can’t rely on jurisdictional laws for such definitions as they might in the US or other locations.
- Safety staffing. Project budgets need to be scoped and funded to include safety equipment and training, including multilingual capability for project teams including multiple nationalities.
- Project-specific safety plan. This plan comprehensively addresses project safety requirements and hazards, and defines the level of management commitment to safety.
- Subcontractor management. Subcontractors must be pre-qualified for safety and demonstrate commitment to the project’s safety standards.
- Orientation and training. “Off-the-shelf” safety training may not be sufficient in projects involving language barriers and differing levels of worker sensitivity to safety. Consistent safety “tool box” meetings and testing to verify comprehension are recommended.
- Substance abuse testing. This is another Western practice that can bring an added element of safety rigor and reassurance.
- Safety pre-task planning (PTP). PTP forms bring consistency to safety programs by specifying procedures and documenting worker acceptance of those procedures through a form signoff system.
- Safe behavior observation (SBO). Project managers are asked to conduct a series of SBOs each week throughout the course of a project to add consistency to safety performance.
- Incident reporting and investigation. Because the nature of safety incidents often varies considerably from one country to the next, it is important to document specifics about incidents as part of a “lessons learned” protocol and to shape corrective actions specific to each site.
- Emergency preparedness. Project-specific emergency action plans (EAP) should be communicated to all project employees during their initial orientations.
- Safety audits and inspections. Because safety standards may not be as rigorous in such critical safety categories as scaffolding, fall protection, excavation, fork lifts, etc., safety audits should be conducted at least weekly and more frequently as conditions require.
Seismic considerations
Certain types of high-tech manufacturing, such as semiconductors and flat panel displays, are particularly sensitive to seismic concerns. Taiwan lies atop a notorious quake-prone ring circling the Pacific Rim dubbed the “Ring of Fire.” The infamous 7.6 Nantou quake of 1999, which left at least 100,000 homeless, was an alarming wakeup call that prompted Taiwan to revisit the earthquake-resistant design codes it introduced in 1981.
High-tech manufacturing facilities are often designed and built beyond local code standards not just to protect life safety, but also to minimize downtime and recovery time following a seismic event. Special construction technologies have also emerged to combat quake damage such as buckling restrained braces (also known as “unbonded braces”), developed in Japan, which dissipate an earthquake’s energy in a controlled, predictable manner. Such technologies can also help reduce construction costs by reducing the amount of steel and foundation piles required. Thanks to these and other vibration isolation technologies, Taiwan has been able to reduce the seismic vulnerability of its high-tech community.
Technology transfer
When Taiwan was emerging as a new hub of high-tech manufacturing, the challenge was to transfer processing technology from other countries into the Taiwan manufacturing environment. Now Taiwan is increasingly a source of technology export to other emergent areas such as mainland China, India, and other parts of Asia. For proprietary technology entering as well as leaving Taiwan, protection of intellectual property continues to be a key concern in Asia.
Taiwan today has access to much processing technology equivalent to that in the US. The Taiwanese government has been reluctant to allow the transfer of its latest technologies to mainland China, preferring a lag of one or two technology generations for many mainland projects Taiwan supports. One of the factors contributing to this limitation of technology transfer is Taiwan’s fear of exporting jobs when it exports technology.
Taiwan is a logical portal for the transition of used processing tools to new facilities on the mainland, in India, and other growing Asian countries. Taiwanese microelectronics projects have often converged technologies and equipment from Japan, Korea, and the US. To protect proprietary intellectual property, constructors often have limited access to the production process details and statistics related to a facility’s production capacities. A common tactic is to “compartmentalize” sensitive technologies into components that aren’t combined until they are installed on a construction site under tight security.
In highly competitive high-tech industries, industrial espionage can take ingenious forms. Knowledgeable snoopers can apply sophisticated formulas to a specification as basic as a facility’s square footage to calculate a plant’s production output, which can then be used to estimate a competitor’s product pricing.
To thwart such tactics, construction materials can be ordered under general specifications, such as requesting bids for a gross volume of concrete, without revealing how many pilings will be poured. Requests for utilities at construction sites can be similarly circumspect, such as requesting a roster of specialty gases without explaining how the gases are to be used, or providing vibration specifications without disclosing specific types of processing tools involved.
Conclusion
Despite the appearance of new “tigers” on the global manufacturing scene, Taiwan’s long march from industrial upstart to mature melting pot for high-tech manufacturing is not likely to end soon. As it has for decades past, Taiwan continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and adaptability, and an admirable ability to keep finding faster, bigger, better, and thriftier ways to give the country’s investors more than their money’s worth
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank two contributors to this article: structural engineer Lee Konczak and construction program manager John Strickland of CH2M Hill’s Portland office.
Gary Matthews received his HNC in mechanical engineering and is managing director of IDC Cleanrooms, a member of the CH2M Hill enterprise. Unit 1 (GF) Alderstone Business Park, MacMillan Road, Kirkton Campus, Livingston EH54 7DF, Scotland, United Kingdom; ph 44/1506-422790, e-mail [email protected].