If your construction company is implementing lean scheduling, congratulations! Also, get ready. It may take over your organization.
If you have no plans to implement lean, you may wish to keep reading. The process by which your lean competition may gain an edge explained:
Lean implementation usually starts with production scheduling. Methods such as the Lean Construction Institute’s Last Planner System® provide the template to improve scheduling and reliability on a construction site, and to remove variability from production.
Before long, however, people in field may feel it’s not right that they’re expected to be the only lean part of the organization. For example, superintendents using lean to manage construction scheduling may suggest the company use lean methods to manage material deliveries.
Then they suggest using lean to bring on subs at the right sequence.
In some companies, senior executives use lean to manage enterprise strategy. In others, lean is used to generate and act upon employee suggestions.
Another application is to use lean methods to help owners make the right decisions quickly!
Leaner companies are more competitive companies
Wherever they are used, lean methods wring waste from – and add value to – any process in the company.People, at some point in their lean thinking, have an aha moment. They develop “eyes for waste.” Once they understand the value they can produce, they see waste everywhere.When that aha! moment happens, there is often fundamental dissatisfaction with processes that haven’t been transformed by lean. With that dissatisfaction, however, comes greater competitiveness.
Companies that are not becoming more competitive, will likely find themselves losing bids to leaner competitors. Talk about dissatisfaction!
There’s one catch
The systems used to manage lean construction scheduling may not lend themselves to other uses. For more on that challenge, and a suggestion for its solution, read this blog post, Eyes For Waste: How Lean Will Reach Every Corner Of Your Company by Susan Parker of Newforma.
Read this blog: Eyes for Waste: How Lean Will Reach Every Corner of Your Company
