Why lean construction

When implemented thoughtfully, this philosophy allows construction teams to complete jobs more efficiently and more successfully, all while making clients and workers happy. Holly Welles is a freelance writer who covers construction and real estate innovations for publishers across the web, including NCCER and Constructible. She also runs her own residential real estate blog, The Estate Update.

Stop wasting time bidding on projects that aren't a good fit for your business. Use the tool to ensure you:. General Contractors. Project Intelligence. Insight for Manufacturers.

Digital Bid Board. Organize all your project leads and bid invites online. Prioritize and manage your project pipeline. Top 10 Projects. Economic Resources. Construction Estimating Survival Kit. United States. Categories Follow Us Subscribe. What Is Lean Construction? The tenets of lean construction include : Continuous improvement: Companies using lean construction practices are open to new ways of doing things and are always looking for ways to improve.

Waste removal: Lean construction companies work to reduce physical waste as well as wasted time and potential. As the saying goes; Time is money. This is exceptionally true in the construction industry where clients expect you to respond quickly and continue to perform high-quality work. When employees are paid on an hourly basis, it is best for a construction firm to get as much done in each hour as possible. When processes are simplified and efficient, they take up less time and stretch the hourly wage a bit more.

If the job is performed efficiently, it takes less time to complete a task, which will put you ahead of schedule. If a job goes any length of time over schedule, you are paying hourly wages and losing money for each additional hour, without increasing the amount of money coming in. Labor costs are wasted when the process is not efficient. This means fewer clients, longer hours and less money for the firm.

Lean construction prevents this. For construction firms and builders, lean construction translates to more money and less waste. This gives construction firms a competitive edge in a growing industry.

Lean construction is a tool that will benefit any construction company. Stop wasting time bidding on projects that aren't a good fit for your business. Use the tool to ensure you:. General Contractors. The projection of a healthier and safer work environment is integral to the continual improvement of the working process.

Creating safer work environments is not just about safety standards and worker protocols, although these are of prime importance. Additional emphasis needs to be put on worker confidence with the industry itself. Employees need to have a social infrastructure that allows them to feel safe generally.

Safe to address problems at the workplace, safe to express concerns about economics, and safe to suggest improvements that maybe less important to the corporate structure of things. Allowing employees to express themselves and feel heard is a big issue that must be dealt within, if a company expects to utilize lean construction as a business model.

As lean construction provides a healthy, and pleasant environment the goal is also to attract new workers that will carry on improving the business. Companies are business entities, the people working within them are not going to live forever, nor work for any business beyond their lifetime.

This is important, because companies have their own life cycles and must be prepared to employ new talent to carry out their long term goals. The success of one generation will be passed onto the next generation, and so on and so on. The employment of younger talent in the construction industries is a sure way to continue refining the leaner process and train new talent to continue this in the decades that follow. A younger generation of people are coming up in the world, their goals are more similar to the lean construction ideologies, but it is simpler than that.

The new generations are living in the world, seeing it for the problems that it really has. Finally the next generation does not need to be told why they should care about lean construction methods, because this already is part of their worldview and how they see the world she be.

In conclusion, lean construction matters because it brings about a way of improving the industries that it impacts. Traditional ways and approaches to construction working can be implemented, but they certainly can be improve. This is for the benefit of the whole industry, from the worker to the consumer. Lean construction focuses on sustainable practices, including green friendly and greener business practices. Even things like solar tech and energy efficiency are being evaluated in the lean construction being used today, making the first steps leave a lesser footprint.

The end results impact us all directly and indirectly, but we all share in these results as our common ground. We all have a stake in the way lean construction stands to better our world and our lives. In the future, it will make a difference without having to be learned.

Techniques like pull planning minimize these issues by improving plan to actual ratio to reduce conflicts. As schedules are planned backward to meet the final deadline, stakeholders can consider and address potential problems ahead of time to coordinate more effectively. Lean Construction has been shown to increase the number of successful projects and stakeholder engagement at all levels. A large part of these results is due to higher productivity rates and employee engagement.

Employees are involved in the project from the beginning and better understand their role in its success. They are also provided an environment that allows them to work in a more productive way. Higher customer and employee satisfaction rates directly impact the long-term success of the firm.

A shift to Lean Construction may seem labor-intensive and hard to pull off. You can start getting results quickly from the methodology by following a step-by-step approach.

Allow for clarification questions, and take time to address questions about scheduling, planning, and accessibility. To build transparency, highlight the individual benefits subcontractors will receive through Lean Construction.

Make it personal to them and their role to get them onboard. Use backward planning in the pull planning method. Determine the sequence of tasks through milestones, which lead to the final deadline. To create coordination schedules, use last planners for tasking. Progress and milestones will need to be assessed continuously to keep things on track.

During check-ins, take note of areas that need improvement and create action plans to address them. Use this time to discuss best practices with stakeholders and keep communication open. Check-ins are also an excellent time to evaluate project performance with your team. As you work on the project and review best practices, develop your own standards for operations.

Communicate these to your team and set expectations for reporting and benchmarks. Discover more steps to embracing Lean Construction in your firm by accessing our latest report. All rights reserved. Benefits of Lean Construction. By Autodesk. What Is Lean Construction?