Introduction to lean construction

In many countries, construction industry contributes as ignificant part of their economy. Construction industry is one of the most complicated and fragmented industries. It is very unique industry and facing many problems such as low productivity, insufficient quality, poor safety, time over-runs, c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abdul Rahman, Ismail, Memon, Aftab Hameed, Ahmad Zaidi, Ahmad Mujahid
Format: Book
Published: Penerbit UTHM 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/5979/
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Summary:In many countries, construction industry contributes as ignificant part of their economy. Construction industry is one of the most complicated and fragmented industries. It is very unique industry and facing many problems such as low productivity, insufficient quality, poor safety, time over-runs, cost over-run and others. In order to address these long term problems various tools and methodologies have been developed. One of the successful approaches adopted to address these problems is lean construction. Lean construction is a new way to manage construction projects that makes significant improvements on complex, uncertain and quick projects. Lean Construction was proposed from Lean philosophies and theories that have offered lots of benefits to the manufacturing industry. It was founded by Toyota Motor Company in 1950’s to reduce manufacturing lead times, eliminate non-value adding activities, and reduce variability. These goals were obtained by methods such as pull scheduling, simplified operations, and buffer reduction. Lean is about doing more with less time, inventory, space, labour, and money. Lean production is a systematic elimination of waste (i.e. overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, and over-processing, defective units) and the implementation of continuous flow and customer pull. There are five issues that drive lean construction including cost, quality, delivery, safety, and morale. The first introduction of “Lean Construction” was in the year 1992 and was introduced by the Finnish scientist, Lauri Koskela. In his technical report “Application of the new production philosophy to construction”, he described the applicability of lean philosophy in construction industry. This book entitled “Introduction to Lean Construction” is an effort to provide a comprehensive introduction of Lean philosophy and its implementation in construction industry based on literature review.