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Jim_Ed's avatar

I work at a GC that has bought in fully to Lean Construction and while it has some benefits and good practices, I think it's gain on efficiency is mostly marginal. It works more as a backstop against "ensuring you don't finish months behind schedule" more than "we're gaining efficiency and finishing early".

The problems with it mainly boil down to its only as good as how much buy-in you get from your subs. I just finished a $50m base build project using Lean Construction concepts. The project had around 50 different subcontractors on it. The big, union electrician who does ~$30m/year with us every year? Pretty easy to get him to buy into it and his team has done it before, so they understand the concepts and how it works. Trying to get the fire protection sub whose owner/PM still uses an aol.com email address to buy into it? Nearly impossible.

The other problem is that since subcontractors are independent from us, they have little incentive to show efficiency in their pull planning. If they determine they can complete their scope in 3 weeks with maximum efficiency, they're going to tell me 5 weeks during our pull planning, so they have some float and I'm not threatening them with LDs if they're late. If they tell me 5 weeks and finish in 4, then they look great. What do they care about the entire project schedule? The lack of skilled labor / companies across the country means that even if they screw me on schedule, chances are I'm going to come crawling back to them to bid my work next time I have a project. We've got very little leverage to enforce compliance.

We've toyed around with paying subs bonuses for finishing quicker, but it's hard to get an owner to agree to allow us to spend money (almost all of our jobs are GMP) for incentive bonuses. Why would they agree to spend additional money to make sure someone meets their contractual obligations?

Anyhow. I look forward to future posts about Lean Construction. It really does have some beneficial additions to a job, and I'm curious to hear about others best practices.

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pozorvlak's avatar

Could you apply a CONWIP system by redefining WIP from "physical items being worked on" to something like "tasks which are ready to be started"? You've previously used the example of a worker needing to take a break from nailing to reload their nailgun - the joints that are in position to be nailed up could be considered WIP.

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