Lean construction

Lean construction is a combination of operational research and practical development in design and construction with an adoption of lean manufacturing principles and practices to the end-to-end design and construction process. Unlike manufacturing, construction is a project-based production process. Lean Construction is concerned with the alignment and holistic pursuit of concurrent and continuous improvements in all dimensions of the built and natural environment: design, construction, activation, maintenance, salvaging, and recycling (Abdelhamid 2007, Abdelhamid et al. 2008). This approach tries to manage and improve construction processes with minimum cost and maximum value by considering customer needs. (Koskela et al. 2002) The origins of many fundamental concepts of LEAN and LEAN construction date back in time.

1. The first integration of a production process, including the concepts of continuous improvement, listening to those actually doing the work, and focus on outcomes was Henry Ford. All of these are core elements of what has become to be known as LEAN.
2. Manufacturing process thinking dates even further back to Arsenal in Venice in the 1450s
3. A lean “thought process” was introduced in The Machine That Changed the World in 1990, however, it and subsequent iterations focus largely on FLOW.
4. While FLOW is important, the achievement of efficient flow, must involve the integration of planning, procurement, and project delivery within a common data environment. This aspect was not addressed significantly, if at all. It was initially implemented in construction, however, via Job Order Contracting in the 1980s (which has subsequently evolved substantially) and later with Integrated Project Delivery. Lauri Koskela, in 1992, challenged the construction management community to consider the inadequacies of the time-cost-quality tradeoff paradigm. Another paradigm-breaking anomaly was that observed by Ballard (1994), Ballard and Howell (1994a and 1994b), and Howell (1998).