LEAN CONSTRUCTION PROCEDURES (LCP®)

History of LEAN

Looms, Supermarkets, Cars and Construction
How can we tell what we need to do with LEAN if we do not understand where it has come from and the status of LEAN within the construction industry?
Why would LEAN Thinking be suitable for the construction environment? New learning often involves letting go of old learning and we are sometimes reluctant to do this – having worked so hard cultivating the old and established our 'noble certainties'! Learning involves anxiety and we say we love to learn, but often privately hate it. Learning involves change.

Lean principles are credited from coming from the Japanese car manufacturing industry. In truth the ideas for LEAN have been borrowed and developed from a range of industries. The conversion to a suitable form for use in the construction industry should therefore not be seen as a constraint, if the dynamics and wide church base of the LEAN philosophy is recognised.

FORD Manufacturing (JIT)           
FORD Manufacturing (JIT) (click for video of Ford T Production)
In 1914 Henry Ford introduced the idea of the moving assembly line to the world while producing his Model-T Ford. He is considered by many to be the first practitioner of Just in Time and Lean Manufacturing.
Ford, in My Life and Work (1922), provided a description that describes his concept of waste: "I believe that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5%. of the energy he expends.... Not only is everything done by hand, but seldom is a thought given to a logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of putting in a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense.... It is waste motion waste effort that makes farm prices high and profits low."
Ford is renowned for his production line, he took people, machines, tooling, and products-- and arranged them in a continuous system for manufacturing the Model T automobile.

Toyota Manufacturing (TPS) 
Sakichi Toyoda; his son, Kiichiro Toyoda; and a production engineer by the name of Taiichi Ohno are the people who were key in creating the Toyota Production System (TPS). Sakichi Toyoda was the inventor of automatic looms. He founded the Toyota Group. He invented a loom in 1902 that would stop automatically if any of the threads snapped this invention created automated looms where a single operator could handle dozens of looms. The principle of designing equipment to stop automatically and call attention to problems immediately is crucial to the ToyotaProduction System (TPS). Sakichi's son Kiichiro headed Toyota Group setting up an automobile-manufacturing operation in the 1930s,. Kiichiro travelled to the United States to study Henry Ford's system in operation. Ford's conveyor system was adapted to the small production volumes of the Japanese car market the president of Toyota commented about the GAP, "Catch up with America in three years, otherwise the automobile industry of Japan will not survive."
Ohno went to the United States, he went to visit automobile plants, but his most important discovery was the supermarket. Japan did not have many supermarkets, and Ohno was amazed. He was impressed at the way customers got exactly what they wanted and in the quantities that they chose. Ohno looked at how the supermarkets supplied customers goods in a very simple, efficient, and timely way. An example of these techniques in LEAN is the kanban system, which provides for PULL of information in and between processes. Taiichi Ohno is regarded as the founder of the Toyota Production System (TPS) which was developed from 1950 following his visit to the Rouge Ford plant in the US. Ohno (1998) describes the most important objective of the TPS as increasing production efficiency through consistently and thoroughly eliminating waste.

TPS evolved out of a need, as the market in post war Japan required small quantities of cars to be produced in many varieties. Toyota realised that they could not follow the same manufacturing technique as American manufacturing because of their relatively low space, resources, and demand. TPS began in 1950, but it was not until the 1973 oil crisis that other firms began to take notice, and since this time the system has been studied, copied and implemented across many industries. Significantly, this was very different to the Ford principle of mass-producing the same Automobiles in large production runs.

LEAN Thinking
John Krafcik is that man who, when working with James P. Womack and others on the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT helped coin the phrase â€lean manufacturing,” which became renowned in The Machine That Changed the World (1990). Womack, Jones and Roos (1990) used the phrase Lean Manufacturing to describe TPS when they printed the results of a five-year study into the automotive industry.

In 1990, Krafcik joined the Ford Motor Co. Having no product development experience, he gained it during his 14 years at Ford. Toyota's vision is that the main use of Lean is not the tools, but eradication of three types of waste: MUDA ("non-value-adding work"), MURI ("overburden"), and MURA ("unevenness"), to reveal problems in a systematic way. The tools are adapted to different problems, without necessarily resolving them. Both Lean and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste. Lean implementation is focused on getting the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to meet the challenge of change. LEAN is the result of a 'need' driven learning process to improve.

It has a dynamic growth cycle and has an evolution which has built on previous ideas and experience. It is not, and has never been something based upon one theoretical context. Essentially, most of the basic goals of lean manufacturing are common sense. Read more ....... Construction Industry