What Daily Process Improvement Looks Like in Construction

What Daily Process Improvement Looks Like in Construction

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Process Improvement is at its best when it doesn’t look like much. We often fall into the trap of needing expensive equipment or consultants to save money, and in the end it costs us money.

Rule of thumb: real change needs to develop from inside. If you try to force it from the outside, it will be short-lived and expensive.

In Construction, you’re managing multiple remote sites, operating on different projects and under unique circumstances. Change needs to occur uniformly within the company’s culture; if your foreman and crews don’t buy in, things will simply revert back to the way it used to be as soon as you’re not around.

Change that makes real money has 2 overlapping qualities: it’s about leadership (it starts with you, not them), and it’s about culture (buy-in required, which leads to consistency). Time is money, and in the construction industry, a shared enthusiasm for always finding more efficient ways to complete projects lays the groundwork for daily process improvement.

 

Leadership

Don’t tell your troops to leap out of the trench while you finish your power lunch. Go to the job sites and and ask what bugs them. Have those conversations that we always think we don’t have time for.

Your crew is paying attention to their environment and their cohorts differently than you are. If the port-a-potty is too far away and the cinder blocks, which no one has used for weeks, are too close, then your team will catch the inefficiency long before you do. If someone doesn’t have the training they need, your team is the most likely to spot it before a dangerous accident. Trust that your foremen and crews have a perspective that you don’t, and create opportunities and incentives for them to offer solutions where they see problems.

If it gets the job done faster, your crews will embrace the “lean way.”  You’ll drive the initiative and your team will respond admirably because they see the wins. But, these changes will evaporate in 4 months if you put the autopilot on now.

Systemic change is a commitment. It’s:

3 steps to leadership in construction

Good leadership is about fostering a healthy sense of urgency. Unhealthy urgency is unsustainable and corner-office-driven. You need urgency that comes from the work site and sustains itself month after month, year after year.

It’s not enough to keep the machinery well oiled for a month. There’s a sense of urgency – akin to a project deadline that never goes away – that needs to stay consistent day in and day out.

 

Culture

“Empowering” is a great word for a PowerPoint or a pep talk, but what we need is follow through. That looks like 4 things:

empowering daily process construction

Together, your company is building more than infrastructure. You’re building a company culture, and all of the standards that go along with it. Make consistent process improvement a part of your corporate ethos and you’ll immediately notice the positive impact to employee morale, productivity, and your bottom line.

 

“Processes underpin business capabilities, and capabilities underpin strategy execution.”

— Pearl Zhu

 

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4 Ways to Build Process Improvement Into the Culture of Your Construction Company

4 Ways to Build Process Improvement Into the Culture of Your Construction Company

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Culture Process Improvement in Manufacturing - featured

In a quest for success, the construction industry has been making rapid strides over the past several decades to build process improvement into their culture.

Take for example the case of 116-year old Turner Construction Company. Company management says that the only reason they became a global entity was due to incorporating principles of process improvement. They focussed on planning and collaboration between departments, which resulted in an uninterrupted workflow, less waste and maximum use of time.

Here are six things that construction companies who adopt process improvement gain in the long run.

  • They learn to cut waste from the work process
  • They use their people more efficiently
  • They plan their operations and projects better
  • They cut transportation times
  • They keep their people safe on the sites
  • They create value that is transferable to employees and clients

Here are four methods to implement culture process improvement in your company.

 

1. Value-Stream-Mapping

Value-Stream-Mapping or VSM is a methodological approach to observe and track, the value and efficiency in every aspect of the construction process.

A Malaysian based construction company named AME Industries decided to use VSM to find a solution to problems faced by the operations department. Before the process started, the Value Added (VA) ratio of the production was 0.4297.  The VSM analysis showed that the critical issue is the queue between the QC inspection and the Painting Primer Coat Process caused by the unbalanced process. Remediation followed which resulted in the VA ratio gaining 11.63% against 0.4297 by reducing the high queue time between the two operations.

The stress in this method is viewing the larger picture and find a route towards it. By encouraging the construction management to literally and figuratively walk through each process, they can learn workflow performance, identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. The end product being a detailed operational map, VSM enables management to make the right decisions to eliminate production waste.

 

2. Gemba Walks

Gemba Walk recommends the management team to walk informally in the work site and interact with the employees and learn about the challenges they face. When employees see that the management is taking an interest in them, it will instil a sense of value in them.

Gemba Walks holds a special place in culture process improvement. This is because the method involves the contribution of every employee engaged in the project and considers them as an important stakeholder.

This doesn’t mean that employees own the project but that they are inspired to have a vested interest in the project. You see, the word Gemba in Japanese means ‘actual place’. The management is encouraged to learn about the ongoing project from employees who are doing physical labour at the ‘project site’.

 

culture process improvement construction

3. Plan-Do-Check-Act

PDCA or Plan-Do-Check-Act is a fascinating concept in process improvement because of its capability to make huge impacts without compromising on the project completion timeline.

Under this technique, a construction process, for example, introducing safety measures, is selected. Titan Cement Company, a leader in cement production, used PDCA to do this.

Instead of trying to teach the entire site crew new procedures, they were divided into small teams and taught one at a time. Meanwhile work continued with the safety procedures that already existed.

At this stage, the change was small enough not to disrupt the entire operation but large enough for management to study the results. Slowly more and more teams were introduced to the new safety measure till it replaced the old one completely.

The result was the completion of all projects without disruption, adoption of better safety standards, clear communication and leadership and zero incidents in 6.5 million man-hours.

An advantage of PDCA is upgradation of processes without it being a stress on employees and management.

 

4. 5 Why’s

Under the 5 Why’s method, construction management should ask ‘why’, five different times and it helps them find the problem and solve it. Though it sounds simple, this is a method that has been tested and proven succesful multiple times.

Asking ‘why’ will not solve the problem, but it will potentially lead to an investigation and finding the root cause. Construction companies have solved large issues like a financial discrepancy in the accounting department to the reason for a delay in the supply of construction materials, by implementing the 5 Why’s concept.

Let us say for example a fleet vehicle refuses to start and if the transportation department uses the 5 Why methodology, here are the possible outcomes:

5 whys

5 Why’s is an approach that encourages to dig deeper to find the root cause, and it comes quite useful many times. However, just like any other lean methodology, the success of this tool depends on the user’s ability to implement it.

The construction industry has a tremendous opportunity to grow and expand by adopting process improvement into their culture. The 4 methods discussed here have brought results in the form of increased productivity, boosting employee’s value and satisfaction, making stakeholders happy and bringing happiness to the customer. With a growing population that demands urban expansion, construction companies are in huge demand by developers and landowners. However, in the new era of construction productivity, only the companies that implement process improvement on an ongoing basis will survive.

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How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Motion

How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Motion

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Motion is the unnecessary movement of people, and construction sites are full of it. With so much activity, some Motion Waste is unavoidable, but too much can quickly become costly and downright dangerous.

 

Safety:

The most dangerous Motion Waste happens without moving our feet. When a worker needs to bend, reach, or stretch beyond his or her comfort level to perform routine tasks, muscles pull, tendons strain, and balance becomes precarious.

Every year thousands are injured and hundreds die on construction sites and Motion Waste plays a significant part. If workers must routinely pick up something heavy, build an impromptu shelf to keep it at a comfortable level. Listen when people say their required movements are causing discomfort. Ask yourself if there’s a way to fix it and make the necessary adjustments to save the hassle later.

 

Site Congestion:

       Job sites are busy places. Multiple trades-people, inspectors, and managers are all vying for space. Whether it’s dodging each other, bumping into each other, or skipping a portion of a job because it’s too busy, saying they’ll come back later, it’s all Waste.

Try to space people out across the site. If everyone is on the North end, move some to the South. It sounds like common sense, but when deadlines loom and our heads are in the job, it’s easy to miss the small stuff.

 

Where Are the Tools?:

How often does a worker spend wandering around, looking for a tool that should be at hand? Or worse, going back to the truck or shop for something missing?

5S, the pillar of Lean emphasizing proper equipment care and placement, offers excellent guidance for businesses who can’t find the hammer. It sounds laughable, but those 3-minute stretches looking, really start to matter when they accumulate by the dozens and hundreds.

construction motion waste

Tips:

       Here are some low-hanging Motion Waste fruit that can add up to big savings:

  • Don’t Park in the Mud: Dirty tires driving across a worksite means someone needs to clean it up at the end of the day. Keeping a clean site means less time cleaning the site.
  • Organize the Permit Box: When papers are all stuffed in, you risk the next person pulling them all out. Create slots and require people to take an extra second not to “stuff-and-crinkle.”
  • Don’t Be a Litterbug: When people leave wood scraps, nails, bits of pipe, water bottles, and lunch wrappers lying around, it often means that someone needs to clean up after you. Clean up after yourself.
  • Start With What You Need: Make sure the starting packet that goes to your team is complete. If it’s not, people will be running around, assembling documents, instead of getting to work.
  • Blueprints and Vital Documents: Most projects have a few key documents that everything hinges on, like blueprints, which are vital to the job’s success. They’re also the same pages we spill coffee on, leave in the sun to fade, the rain to get soaked, and stuff behind the seat of the truck. When we can’t read them anymore, we need to print new ones, leading to a few different Wastes, stacking up into a real headache. Take care of your blueprints!
How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Talent

How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Talent

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You can’t automate the process of finding and fixing Deadly Waste. It’s case by case and pops up anywhere.

If you research the Deadly Wastes, you’ll often find just 7 of them. Talent was added last, and still doesn’t get the credit it deserves. We can nitpick about fighting Waste all we want, but engaged workers are the only tool to get you there.

 

Perceptions:

Your construction project is an ecosystem of interconnected partners, each relying on the other to be able to do their job. The paradox is that while you’re thinking about the overall project health of the project, they’re thinking about getting their part done, so they can move on.

Lean Thinking prioritizes value of the customer over individual stakeholder needs. Encourage your contractors to feel more engaged in the process, and to think of their list of tasks as a list of commitments to perform, in order to add value. It’s a subtle shift with massive process improvement implications.

 

It Starts at the Beginning:

Empowering your workers to fight Waste starts at the beginning. Hire people for their attitude and outlook, not just for the skills they come pre-packaged with. Having a knack for quick framing won’t matter much if they don’t notice the defective measurement that will require a costly fix down the road.

Make the kick-off process more than a “Hu-ah” and handing out documents. Talk about the Wastes and give everyone the right to be a leader in identifying them, no matter how small or who may be at fault.

Everyone plays a skills-based role, but that should only be a part of their investment. Hire them as individuals first, skills second, and continue respecting them for the ideas they bring forward. If workers don’t feel respected, they’re unlikely to think about what’s bugging them, let alone report it. When a worker has an idea, engage them in dialogue about the pros and cons. Don’t brush them off with, “Thanks for that,” and walking away. Respecting them by listening to them will incentivize them to talk to you and is more likely to save you costly Deadly Wastes.

Of course, it’s not all up to you. Train your foreman and other managers to respect their crews in the same way. Put real consequences in place for workplace disrespect, no matter who it’s between.

Teamwork on Construction Site - Talent Waste in Lean Business

The Importance of Talent:

When it comes to Waste, materials and processes get the lion’s share of attention. But our businesses were born, built, and grown on human creativity.

Talent Waste is the hardest to measure. We can measure other Wastes by what we throw away, spend on extra time, and have to repair. The best way to measure Talent Waste is to not ask what’s costing your business, but to ask where your business could be if your workers’ Talent wasn’t wasted.

An engaged, vigilant workforce is the only tool you need to crush the Deadly Wastes and open new realms of profitability, but you can’t legislate or delegate engagement. It starts from the top and must continue to flow from the top, no matter how bad of a day you’re having.

See our previous article on Talent Waste here.

How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Inventory

How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Inventory

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Your jobs use massive amounts of Inventory, and all of it has to be sourced, delivered, and managed, so it’s available when the right person needs it. However, having excessive Inventory means absorbing unnecessary shrinkage costs and, to add insult to injury, paying more to move excess inventory off-site, either to another site or a landfill.

Take Time to Plan:

It starts with planning. Don’t assume how much product you’ll need based on broad strokes; dig into the details. The extra hour it takes could mean the difference between having excess materials sitting on site at completion or making an excessive number of trips to buy more during the build.

Staging Site Nightmares:

Take the time to properly manage your staging sites by running through the worst-case scenarios and preparing for them. Is your lumber sitting on or around dirt that could quickly turn to mud, degrading the bottom layers? If so, find a dry space where your lumber is safe from water damage.

If you don’t have access to an enclosed area, spend the money for proper fencing. External theft is a massive loss of inventory and is easy to avoid. For more extensive insurance, install a camera in a highly visible spot to deter would-be fence climbers. If you’re not able to hook it up to make it work, don’t worry: it just needs to look like it works.

constructions plans and construction site

Building Supply:

We all want to be confident in our businesses, but when confidence leads to idealism, over-inventory can be one of the side-effects.

Here’s a scenario: times are good, orders are piling up, and you could save 20% on materials by ordering a huge batch of pre-made trusses to service these and future orders, should the pattern continue. Instead, the orders dwindle, and the trusses sit. You’re now left either paying to store them inside, or watching the elements wear them down. That’s where idealism leaves a bitter taste.

You’ll pay a little more for the pull-driven system, only ordering the materials when orders come in, but that extra is well worth it if the orders stop and you’re prepared.

Document Your Inventory:

This will feel like a chore, and many will shrug it off in favour of just getting it done, but documenting your Inventory can ensure serious Waste reduction.

Whether it’s tools per truck or yards of sand on a site, make it company policy to write down where everything is. When a hammer is lent to another crew and 10 yards of sand are laid down, make a note of it. Here’s why:

  • Theft: things will get stolen, but this will tell you what and from where, so you can take precautions next time.
  • Borrowing: If one crew needs to borrow another crew’s equipment, they’ll be able to see if they can spare it, or if they’ll need it tomorrow. It will allow you to move tools, materials, and equipment back and forth between crews and sites without having to buy excess.
  • Placement: Knowing what is in whose truck will help in scheduling tasks proactively.
How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Transportation

How to Reduce Deadly Waste in Construction: Transportation

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Unlike manufacturing, wherein materials are assembled at home base, construction happens remotely, where literally tonnes of materials are being moved around each day.

Bullets don’t win wars, but logistics do. The same rules apply with construction. If the proper materials aren’t in the right place at the right time, downtime accumulates quickly.

Lean Thinking:

Building a house involves dozens of stakeholder groups all contributing to the whole, while prioritizing their own individual interests. Their logistics are largely their own, because they’re not motivated to collaborate. Lean thinking seeks to pivot the focus toward the value of the project as a whole, rather than its individual pieces. When partners collaborate with more than lip-service, value goes up, cost and frustration go down, and everyone benefits.

If the plumber needs to run to the store, maybe the electrician needs something. Rather than making two separate trips, the two could be tackled at once, saving time. With our current system, a process like this may feel like science fiction. However, if you change the conversation so the “task list” becomes a series of commitments that everyone is engaged with, in order to bring more value to the product, it’s not far off.

Staging Area:

Construction SiteThis sounds self-explanatory, and it largely is, but it can also fall through the cracks when you’re rushing through setup time, trying to get started.

Take the time to map your jobsite, indicating where to stage your equipment, trucks, and materials. Mark your traffic flows and walkways. Ensure your delivery drivers have a reliably open path to the stage to avoid honking, panic, and overall chaos.

Distance Trumps Discounts:

Where are you buying your materials? Often, far away suppliers will tantalize you with discounts, but do your logistical math. If the fuel costs check out, and you’re not having to build up excessive inventory levels (more on that later), it may pay off for your initial shipments.

During the job, however, don’t send your foreman driving 40 km for fill-ins. You’ll always need last-minute deliveries, but there will always be local businesses to supply you. The 20% extra is well worth the cost of saving fuel and keeping a senior person at the jobsite for hours at a time, rather than on the road.

Construction Plans and Construction Site

Check the Address:

This is the biggest “facepalm” Waste of them all. It’s also inexcusable in our technological age, and low-hanging fruit for improving Transportation Waste.

You should have zero tolerance for wrong address deliver. Bad handwriting or false inputting should never be an excuse. Your drivers should always confirm the address with someone on-site and take the extra 20 seconds to use Google Maps.

Keep Accurate Logs:

Many stakeholders in any construction project hate paperwork, but if you let your mileage logs fall behind, you’re sending your trucks out blind. It’s a sloppy habit that can easily snowball into massive Waste.

It may not catch up to you for a while, but it will hurt when it does. Roadside breakdowns or failed roadside inspections are profit killers. Even worse is finding yourself replacing critical and expensive equipment pieces because routine maintenance fell behind (due to improper logging). As painful as they may feel at the time, keep up to date with logs and prevent breakdown further along the line.