The Origins Of Lean Thinking

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while

“Lean is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the **product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection.” Lockwood [24].

Lean Thinking is an integrated system of standards, procedures, tools, and techniques that focus on harmonizing work flows, managing differences in production flows, and lessening waste. The process provides several standard solutions to common organizational problems like complexity reduction and visual management. The

Production practices have had an important role in satisfying the dynamic market. Many approaches have being developed in order to respond effectively to specific business requirements. In fact, some areas of management have focused its study on the overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of production in an effort to find the best methodology that ensures the business success and performance. However, complexities arise in this field because many variables such as costs, inventory, scheduling, suppliers, etc have to be considered in any business. Lean approach and the traditional approach are two points of view that aim to address this complexities, and those will be examined in this essay.

As the article mentioned: lean is not mean. It promotes respect for people (both staff and customers – patients) while ensuring that the best work is being done, utilizing the less resources at a lower costs. Can be argued that people are one of the main resources for a Lean implementation.

Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.

It is more a set of guidelines than a formal methodology. It was introduced by **Toyota systems , a leading automobile manufacturing organization. Although it originated in automobile manufacturing systems it is now used in software development successfully. The primary focus of lean is continuous improvement and flow of the value from the inception of the idea all the way to the customer.

Over the past few years, the construction industry has been changing dramatically. One of the most important stages in the construction management and business management is the planning phase. They share similar two main levels of planning which are the strategic and operational planning. However, business management planning to decide in advance what should be done, and how to do it, when you do and you are done. On the other hand, Construction management strategic planning is to deal with selection on a high level of overall objective of the project, including the scope, procurement methods, schedules and financing options but the planning of operations, including the

In general, IPD, Lean, or BIM is a particularly new controversial phenomenon in the construction industry that generates many debates and discussions around each component’s advantages and disadvantages, effectiveness, and potential risks (Guerra, 2010). As BIM’s complementary connection to IPD, there are numerous questions regarding requirements of using BIM in IPD-based projects. Like BIM-IPD considerations, is Lean construction really necessary for every IPD-related project or only enforced by the project team favor? Interestingly, many construction professionals question that whether or not IPD can implement without the use of BIM as well as Lean principles. One step at a time, these inquiries are still exploring by experts and analysts whereas attempting efforts of combining those three elements in construction projects are currently promoted as dominant worldwide tendencies. Thus, interdependent corporations of ILB need to be carefully evaluated in order to flawlessly synergy them in real world cases. Specific partnerships for each combination of two factors will be subsequently revealed and examined in next section. Figure 2.1 points out the MacLeamy Curve for construction phases and costs through perspectives of Construction Users Roundtable (CURT, 2004). As mentioned above, IPD, Lean construction, and BIM not only remarkable share numerous mutual characteristics and common goals in quality, cost, and time, they

The application and implementation of lean principles or thinking is a process that requires commitment from every stakeholder in the organization. This process entails commitment to the organization's workers and to the system itself in order to make changes towards improvement. Generally, the implementation of lean thinking is geared towards continuous improvement through the elimination of waste. However, lean management or implementation of the principles sometimes incorporate mistakes that are made by leaders in the execution process. This is mainly because lean leadership appears to be simple though its complex because of the costs associated with it. The mistakes usually occur because of intrinsic complexities of exploring deeply into organizational philosophies, business strategy, psychology, and macroeconomics.

It is hard to find any industry that has not been significantly impacted by the technology revolution, and the construction industry is no exception. In this technology driven age, construction project managers and contractors have access to a number of software options that offer the logistic and administrative support necessary to create a streamlined, efficient process that has the capacity to increase productivity, improve communication and reduce overall costs.

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

Undisputedly, construction process is one of the most complex human endeavours in history, with huge amount of details that involve large number of people working at the same time on a single deliverable object, be it buildings, bridges, dams or the likes, the process is equally demanding, challenging and complicated. Every single person with a role on a construction project needs information about what to do, how to do it, where to do it and when to do it and lots more information required to carry out a single task successfully.

Besides that, lean management is one of the quality management approach. Lean management is an approach that supports continuous improvement, eliminate unnecessary process to improve efficiency and quality (Allen and Wigglesworth, 2009). Lean management originates at Toyota by Taiichi Ohno. Womak and Jones describe the 5 steps in applying lean management. First, define goals that align with customers needs and wants. Second, identify every steps in the process and eliminate unnecessary steps and steps that do not create value for customers. Third, connect the steps that create value. Fourth, encourage employee involvement and participation. Fifth, constantly improve to