Continuous Improvement is Key to the New Era of Construction Productivity

Over the last 50 years many businesses in the manufacturing industry have dramatically improved their production protocols. Those businesses have achieved strong results by adapting methods from the Toyota Production System (TPS). The core tenet of TPS is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency, thereby earning the system the general name of 'lean' manufacturing.

Now, more and more industries are finding useful applications of 'lean' within their own productivity agendas.

9 Actions To Combat Defect-Driven Lean Waste

At the end of our value stream mapping series, we explored the concept of VSM as a mechanism for continuous improvement. The idea is that construction firms can utilize value stream mapping to continuously improve, identify, prevent, and eliminate the 8 wastes of Lean from impacting the productivity of their organization.

To that end, it pays to take a closer look at what constitutes the 8 wastes of lean and how each lean waste can disrupt a company or construction program.

Let's begin with Defects!

6 Tips For Success With Value Stream Mapping (Or Any Lean Process)

In part 2 of our value stream mapping series, we provided a few essential tips for getting started with VSM. Now we will focus on to how to gain traction with the concept and reach and maintain a level of success.

Mapping the flow of value provides a great opportunity for people to align themselves and their work processes.^[1] By encouraging value stream conversations and dialogues within your team, people will naturally begin to identify what they can do to improve. 

One Essential Ingredient and 4 Tips To Begin Implementing Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping is just one among dozens of Lean Construction principles, concepts, processes and practices designed to improve construction productivity and efficiency.

Also known as lean execution, it is a method of mapping the flow of a project or process based on its current state-of-being, and defining a future state from a careful analysis of all the working components. 

7 Project Risk Factors That Can Be Improved By Value Stream Mapping

In today’s market, owners demand projects to be delivered on time, on budget, with high quality and without any injury. In order to meet these demands and improve project efficiency we need to truly understand project flow and the constraints that hinder value and productivity.

If we were able to better predict or plan for project unknowns, project risk, and non-valued added activities, we would be able to influence improvements in all phases of the construction process...