Lean Construction - What Is Lean Construction?

What Is Lean Construction?

Lean construction is a “way to design production systems to minimize waste of materials, time, and effort in order to generate the maximum possible amount of value (Koskela et al. 2002) ”. Designing a production system to achieve the stated ends is only possible through the collaboration of all project participants (Owner, A/E, Constructors, Facility Managers, End-user) at early stages of the project. This goes beyond the contractual arrangement of design/build or constructability reviews where constructors, and sometime facility managers, merely react to designs instead of informing and influencing the design (Abdelhamid et al. 2008).

Lean Construction recognizes that desired ends affect the means to achieve these ends, and that available means will affect realized ends (Lichtig 2004). Essentially, Lean construction aims to embody the benefits of the Master Builder concept (Abdelhamid et al. 2008).

"One can think of Lean Construction in a way similar to mesoeconomics. Lean Construction draws upon the principles of project-level management and upon the principles that govern production-level management. Lean Construction recognizes that any successful project undertaking will inevitably involve the interaction between project and production management." (Abdelhamid 2007)

Lean construction supplements traditional construction management approaches with (Abdelhamid 2007): (1) two critical and necessary dimensions for successful capital project delivery by requiring the deliberate consideration of material and information flow and value generation in a production system; and (2) different project and production management (planning-execution-control) paradigms.

While Lean Construction is identical to Lean Production in spirit, it is different in how it was conceived as well how it is practiced. There is a view that "adaptation" of Lean Manufacturing/Production forms the basis of Lean Construction. The view of Lauri Koskela, Greg Howell, and Glenn Ballard is very different, with the origin of Lean Construction arising mainly from the need for a production theory in construction and anomalies that were observed in the reliability of weekly production planning.

Getting work to flow reliably and predictably on a construction site requires the impeccable alignment of the entire supply chain responsible for constructed facilities such that value is maximized and waste is minimized. With such a broad scope, it is fair to say that tools found in Lean Manufacturing and Lean Production, as practiced by Toyota and others, have been adapted to be used in the fulfillment of Lean Construction principles. TQM, SPC, six-sigma, have all found their way into Lean Construction. Similarly, tools and methods found in other areas, such as in social science and business, are used where they are applicable. The tools and methods in construction management, such as CPM and work breakdown structure, etc., are also utilized in Lean Construction implementations. The three unique tools and methods that were specifically conceived for Lean Construction are the Last Planner System, Target Value Design, and the Lean Project Delivery System.

If the tool, method, and/or technique will assist in fulfilling the aims of Lean Construction, it is considered a part of the toolkit available for use. A sampling of these tools includes: Choosing By Advantages (CBA), BIM (Lean Design), A3, Process design (Lean Design, Offsite fabrication and JIT (Lean Supply), Value Chain Mapping (Lean Assembly), Visual site (Lean Assembly); 5S (Lean Assembly), Daily crew huddles (Lean Assembly).

The common spirit flows from shared principles:

    • Whole System Optimisation through Collaboration and systematic learning
    • continual improvement/pursuit of perfection involving everyone in the system
    • a focus on delivering the value desired by the owner/client/end-user
    • allowing value to flow by systematically eliminating obstacles to value creation and those parts of the process that create no value
    • creating pull production

The differences in detail flow from a recognition that construction is a project based production where the product is generally a prototype.

As Sowards stated (2004) the priority for all construction work is to:

  1. keep work flowing so that the crews are always productive installing product;
  2. reduce inventory of material and tools and
  3. reduce costs.

While Lean Construction’s main tool for making design and construction processes more predictable is the Last Planner System (see below) and derivatives of it, other lean tools already proven in manufacturing have been adapted to the construction industry with equal success. These include: 5S, Kanban, Kaizen events, quick setup/changeover, Poka Yoke, Visual Control and Five Whys (Mastroianni and Abdelhamid 2003, Salem et al. 2005).

In lean design set based design, design structure matrices and Target Value Design strategies are proving valuable. Many other tools are part

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