Lean Construction: what it is and how it works

Have you stopped to think about the amount of material that is wasted in a work? You've probably been through a construction site and noticed an excess of material in the buckets for disposal, haven't you? And the constant postponement of the deadline for delivery a construction? Not to mention the budget overflow!

Well, to solve this there is Lean Construction, which is nothing more than the Lean mentality applied to construction. But you may be wondering, "What is Lean?"

So, let's get some insight into this methodology that has radically changed the construction industry around the world.

What is Lean Construction?

Well, let's start by understanding what Lean methodology is. You may have heard of this way of structuring production, but you still do not know what it really is. Well then, let's go back in time.

We landed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the production of Henry Ford's T model, being marked as the beginning of modern production. Years later, with the end of World War II and a very fragile and under-resourced Japan, Toyota creates a model of
production system based on waste disposal and conscious use of the raw material.

This model called the Toyota Production System (TPS) would later become the basis for what would come to be known as Lean Manufacturing in the book "The Machine That Changed the World" by James P. Womack , Daniel Roos and Daniel T. Jones. Lean thinking began to be used outside the factory environment, influencing other branches of industry.

In 1992, Lauri Koskela brings the lean mentality to civil construction, adapting it to suit the environment of a construction site.

It can be seen that Lean Construction has some peculiarities in relation to Lean
Manufacturing, because in construction the workplace changes for each enterprise, the workforce that moves around the product and there is almost no repetitiveness of enterprises.

Lean Construction is the application of principles of lean thinking to construction activities, adapting the methodology to the peculiarities of the sector. It seeks to reduce costs and minimize damage to a building, as well as speed up the process so that everything is delivered on time.

Differences between Traditional Construction vs. Lean Construction

The main difference between the traditional construction method and lean construction is conceptual. It's the way you look at the production process.

While in the traditional method we look at the process and only divide it into subprocesses, in Lean we separate activities that add value to those that do not add value.

If the customer is not willing to pay for any activity, then it does not add value. Activities such as movement, material flow, wait and rework do not add value to the product.

Lean thinking aims to eliminate all waste as much as possible, so it is often used during project management.

Taiichi Ohno, head of the TPS, defined seven types of waste, but later publications defined eight types. These are:

• Defects
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Non-Utilized Talent
• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Extra-Processing.

If you want to know more about these wastes, be sure to take a look at our 8 Lean waste, which explains them in detail.

However, there are activities that do not add value but are necessary for the process. The goal is to try to eliminate activities that do not add value and are not necessary, as well as reduce waste in others.

For Lean Construction, the concept of value is directly linked to customer satisfaction, not inherent in the execution of the process.

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Perceived value from the customer's point of view

As we have seen, the starting point for lean production is the concept of perceived value by the customer. Thus, for an activity to be characterized as one that adds value, it must meet certain requirements, such as:

• The client must be willing to pay for the activity
• The activity must in some way transform the product or service
• The activity must be done correctly the first time.

The value for the customer is equal to the sum of the benefits minus the cost. The higher the value perceived by the customer, the lower the cost perceived by the customer.

In order to have a satisfied customer, the company's performance must be at least equal to the customer's expectation.

If the company can achieve a performance superior to the expectation generated by the customer, this customer will become a faithful soldier of this company, being a advertisement chanel, which is undoubtedly the goal of any company.

Principles of Lean Construction

Lean Construction has 11 principles developed by Koskela, but let's highlight the 5 most important and significant. They are:

1 - Reduce activities that do not add value

This is certainly one of the most fundamental principles for lean construction. Process efficiency can be improved and its losses reduced not only by improving the efficiency of activities conversion and
flow, but also by eliminating some of the flow activities.

However, we must be careful not to take this principle to the extreme, because as we have seen, there are activities that do not add value but are essential for the overall efficiency of processes, such as dimensional control, training of the workforce and installation of safety devices.

In general, the first step in reducing these activities is to explicit the flow activities, through the representation of the process flow. Once explicit, these activities can be controlled and, if possible, eliminated.

2 - Increase the value of the product by considering the needs of the customer

This principle is related to the concept of process as a value generator. Through this principle, it is established that the needs of internal and external customers must be clearly identified and this information should be considered in product design and production management.

In order to apply this principle, we must process mapping, systematically identifying customers and their requirements for each stage of the process.

To get an efficient application of this principle, we have to keep in mind that customer is not only the external customer, who ordered the enterprise, but also the subsequent work team, which is the internal customer.

3 - Reduce variability

When it comes to variability, they can be of three types:

• Variability in previous processes: it is related to process suppliers. Example: Ceramic blocks with large dimensional variations.
• Variability in the process itself: related to the execution of a process. Example: variability in the duration of execution of a given activity, over several cycles.
• Variability in demand: related to the desires and needs of the clients of a process. Example: Certain customers of a developer are requesting changes to the building design.

But why reduce variability? Well, of course, a uniform product usually brings more satisfaction to the customer, because the quality of the product actually corresponds to the specifications previously established.

If we do not follow this principle, we will face problems in our production, increasing the share of activities that do not add value and the time required to execute a product mainly for the following reasons:

• Interruption of workflows caused by interference between teams. This happens when a work team stands still or needs to be moved to another work front, due to the delays of the previous team.
• Non-acceptance of products out of specification by the customer, resulting in rework or rejects.

4 - Reduce the time of the production cycle

This principle originates from the Just in Time philosophy, created by TPS. Cycle time can be defined as the sum of all times (transport, wait, processing, and inspection) to produce a given product.

The application of this principle is strongly related to the need to compress time available as a mechanism to force the elimination of flow activities.

To apply this feature, we will have a broad set of actions involved, such as:

• Elimination of flow activities that are part of the production cycle.
• Concentration of production effort in a smaller number of units (smaller batches), through production planning and control.
• Changes in the precedence relations between activities, eliminating interdependencies between them so that they can be executed in parallel.

5 - Simplify by reducing the number of steps or parts

This principle is often used in the development of streamlined building systems. The greater the number of components or steps in a process, the greater the number of activities that do not add value.

This is due to the auxiliary preparation and completion tasks required for each step in the process (eg scaffolding, cleaning, final inspection, etc.), and also because, in the presence of variability, it tends to increase the possibility of interference between the teams.

To achieve simplification, we can use some techniques, such as:

• Use of prefabricated elements, reducing the number of steps for the execution of a building element.
• Use of multipurpose teams, rather than a larger number of specialized teams.
• Effective planning of the production process, seeking to eliminate interdependencies and to aggregate small tasks into larger activities.

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