When your gemba is a construction site
For many, the construction industry is the ultimate example of a traditional environment full of bad work habits. Safety is often abysmal, they say, quality is considered optional, and delays are the norm – not to mention the constant increase in costs. Although much of this is true, as a lean thinker, I could not help but see a great opportunity here: what better environment to start applying lean principles than one with such a bad reputation for waste?
I have been running PO Construction, the family business my grandfather started after World War II, for the past seven years, and I believe there is no roadmap for a lean journey, only a clear goal and a few basic prerequisites. Or at least that is the approach we have been using.
The goal we set for ourselves could not be clearer: always satisfy the customer, increasing value and reducing lead time by removing waste. In doing so, we vowed to learn from our mistakes, develop people's skills and improve our products or create new ones. All of this was to be done through continuous improvement and respect for those involved. In terms of prerequisites, we have learned that they are safety, tidiness and basic stability.
SAFETY FIRST
If your factory or office is being renovated, and you think that justifies your poor record on safety or 5S, you will feel right at home on a construction site. Picture an ordinary construction site, and tidiness and cleanliness are hardly the first two things that come to mind. Yet they are prerequisites for lean success. It is essential to begin your lean journey by tidying up and making the gemba safe – being able to see the work and concentrate on problems when and where they happen without having to worry about our lives and safety is critical.
At PO Construction, we found that the 5S approach needed to be slightly revisited and expressed in our own words (only the first two S's, while the last three follow lean tradition):
- Sort and throw away: we sort our materials and equipment and keep what we need, send back to the warehouse what we do not need now but can reuse, and throw away what is no longer usable or needed.
- Set in order: “a place for everything, and everything in its place”.
- Clean or shine.
- Standardize.
- Sustain.
Safety is a priority, and no one can argue with that: by adopting our own version of 5S and applying it in the gemba, we slowly began to reduce the accident rate (by 20% a year) – a well-known problem in the construction industry.
LEARNING TO SEE PROBLEMS; SEEING PROBLEMS TO LEARN
Our next step was to list the problems we found on site. In our business, it is hard to see problems as they happen – often, a trade would arrive but be unable to do its part of the work because of a problem left by the previous trade. As a result, it is always the painter's fault if the project is late, simply because he is the one who has to deal with the customer at the end of the process.
Faced with this problem, we realized we had to learn to see. We started writing down the problems we encountered and found a way to explain them clearly (drawing the problem seemed to work well for us). Once the problem is clear to everyone, the solution usually becomes obvious (the countermeasure, not the fix) – after all, construction is not rocket science.
As we saw more problems, we became experts at finding waste and proposing countermeasures. As CEO, my contribution to this activity is critical: I regularly visited all the construction sites and reviewed with them how they were solving their problems. I tried to identify patterns and determine in which instances they needed headquarters to help. When people found a smart, creative way to deal with a problem, I spread the word.
The truth is that new ideas for improvement emerged from our problems. They were our kaizens (improvements). Another important part of my job is supporting the teams in testing new solutions, which is often hard for us, because the task that generated the problem has usually already finished by the time we test our new idea. So I usually test it at another site. This can be frustrating for the teams, but we have already been able to transfer our ideas from one site to another a few times.
SPEEDING UP PROJECTS
Another common problem (not only in construction) is the popular “whatever cannot be done today can still be done tomorrow”. If part of the work is very hard, the tendency is to leave it and come back later. Hey, you never know… sometimes problems just disappear overnight, right?
There are many examples of this, but my favorite is perhaps the one about a bricklayer who had already built all the walls on two floors of one of our projects, but only to a height of a meter and a half because he did not have the scaffolding to go higher. That means the painter cannot start anywhere, since no area has actually been finished.
It is common for trades to occupy much more space than they need, because they see it as a way to ensure they are not interrupted. If, for whatever reason, they cannot work in one room or floor, they still have many other spaces to focus on. Unfortunately, spreading out like this usually means longer lead times .
BACK TO BASICS
When you ask how long a task will take, you usually get a quick answer: six weeks, for example. That is what it will take for a contractor to complete a certain job (the time usually includes a bit of buffer to be safe). Ask about the pace and you will get the answer: eight weeks divided by the number of units (rooms, apartments, floors…), plus a bit of buffer resulting from the calculation. But sometimes, with lean, it is important to go back to basic principles. The lean questions I have learned to ask are: “what is your takt time (production pace)?” or “if we complete this task room by room, how much time is needed between the same step of the task in two rooms?”. Picture a project with workers walking one behind the other through the rooms of a building. It is obvious that reducing the time needed to complete their tasks can be achieved in two ways: by making each worker walk faster or by making each worker walk closer to the next.
Of these two approaches, the latter is easier. Before thinking about working faster, we should focus on wasting less time between the tasks of two trades.
SPEEDING UP FLOW
To speed up flow, we need to work in a just-in-time way and produce only what is needed on each job. The first consequence of this change is to stop working as soon as a task is finished (to eliminate overproduction in one trade's work and delays in another's) – needless to say, this seems very counterintuitive. Of course, the more I do in a day, the better! However, a project does not need more work carried out in a day, but finished tasks so that the next trade can start.
We always want our contractors to make money too (win-win). To ensure that happens, we finish tasks completely, apartment after apartment, and use the extra time to prepare for the next day.
This is a big cultural change: these days, we know there is more value in a finished apartment than in one we are working on just for the sake of working.
What I noticed was that, once this is understood, flow automatically tends to speed up, as each trade realizes that having more time to prepare for the next day creates better working conditions, which, in turn, reduces risks and limits the need for buffer time (cushion). In this new system, trades can come one after the other and work closer together than before, and problems are gradually eliminated.
When working apartment by apartment, the work content (the time a trade needs to complete a task) varies according to the size of the apartment. If we want a contractor to work on one apartment at a time, we need to come up with a way to make effective use of the extra time we have when the work content is low and to avoid overtime when, conversely, the work content is high. The idea is to separate value-adding work from preparation work and from the activities that come at the end (such as cleaning). Depending on the situation, we can use the extra time to prepare for the next day or leave the cleaning for the next day to avoid extra costs.
MORE LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
To ensure that today's work schedule is actually completed today, we need to reduce incidents and problems on site. It is up to management to show up and support the worker when a problem occurs. All problems need to be solved, and we need to make sure they do not happen again.
Workers usually find it hard to focus on a problem, because they have a lot to do during the day and, over time, will find ways to simplify the work around them. They feel helpless in the face of a problem, but the truth is that they know what needs to be done – they are the ones who do the work every day! On the other hand, management has the responsibility to encourage problem solving, but does not know the problem as well as the workers do.
That is why management and workers need to join forces and work on solving problems together. In doing so, we also learn more about the way each task should be done and get better at scheduling the work. Sometimes, a pattern emerges from a series of problems we observe. Every worker will have seen one part of a bigger situation, but will not understand the overall context. Management (even senior management), on the other hand, has a view of the overall context and is able to use problems to identify trends. Often, “connecting the dots” shows us that what we have done so far is wrong or not productive. Some of the greatest moments of discovery occur in these situations.
PRODUCT IMPROVEMENTS
Finally, by seeking better products and processes that will reduce our carbon footprint, by solving problems and doing kaizen, we generate knowledge that feeds directly into our next generation of products. If your industry is similar to construction (a project-based environment with a short process life cycle), you may be able to incorporate your improved practices into your work within a few months.
Some changes are big, and others more incremental. At PO Construction, for example, after a difficult project using a specific type of thermal barrier for the first time, we imagined and developed our own ideal thermal barrier. Since then, we have gradually improved our barrier and the way we use it. Today the new product is commonly used in most of the buildings we construct. In fact, we have already started designing our buildings based on our use of this technology, which has had dramatic effects on energy performance.
My plan is to keep improving the work at our construction sites based on our strategy and to spread the “new way of doing things” throughout PO Construction so that it becomes a foundation for new projects.
To sum up, and to draw a few lessons that others in the construction industry may find useful, here is what our approach to each new project involves:
- Work safely – clean up the site and make everyone's safety a priority so that you can look at the work and identify waste.
- Right the first time – learn to see defects instead of passing them on to the next step, and stop at the first sign of deviation. You must also work to transform your company's mindset and start welcoming problems with open arms (ask “why did a problem happen?” instead of “who is to blame for this?”), developing your people's problem-solving skills.
- “Done and dispatched” – value finished work more than work in progress. Increase the stability of your processes and reduce “batch sizes”.
- Speed up the flow of trades – value is not added unless the worker “touches” the building (painting, drilling, repairing and so on), and empty rooms are nothing but waste in the form of waiting. You should strive to speed up flow by having one person working in each room.
5. Reduce the carbon footprint – unleash your people's creativity through problem solving and always think of new ideas to improve a building's environmental performance. The construction industry is a major contributor to global warming due to the enormous amount of CO2 it emits.
