Building & Construction Visual Management

We support the excellent work of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) in their programme and education events and also were delighted to provide speakers on the subject of Visual Management for the Construction Industry at an event arranged by Salford University. Salford University is also doing great work in promoting the huge benefits that are open to this industry by the implementation of Lean.

The Construction industry has found huge benefits of utilising the Collaborative Planning Technique, which is based on the application of Lean methods to deliver construction projects. The benefits are well documented and include:

Deliver better value to the customer to increase satisfaction
Remove waste from work processes to reduce time and cost

It also enables teams to deliver the same amount of work but with less resource through:

Production control – better productivity through effective resource and information management
Collaborative mapping – better planning through the creation of process-based look-ahead programmes
Process improvement – through the implementation and adoption of continuous improvement tools

Clarity has successfully helped create ingenious visual management solutions to help with Collaborative Planning, especially with creating Collaborative Maps for construction companies involved in the rail industry.

As well as, and even more importantly than, the advantages of being able to deliver construction projects on time, cost-effectively to a high standard of quality, there are very significant improvements in Health and Safety records where Lean is implemented. Problem-solving techniques, such as Root Cause Analysis and the 5 why’s are used to establish the underlying cause of health and safety incidents, and these can then be controlled by a simple visual management board. In this way, lead measures are being worked on (eg: is full being PPE worn?), rather than lag (historical) measures (eg: number of lost time injuries) giving opportunity to stop problems before they happen.

Basic 5S is also a vital part of Lean Construction. Not only does this ensure that time is not wasted searching for missing tools, often over large areas, it also increases health and safety dramatically by highlighting safe paths, indicating where safety equipment is missing and showing where protective equipment is not being worn.

An important part of this work is to ensure that the construction industry itself is backed by a Lean Supply Chain, and the LCI have put a lot of effort into ensuring that their supply chain adopts Lean to ensure that information, materials, equipment and manpower for each task in a project come in on-time, complete and meeting quality standards.