Many of you are familiar with Lean Construction, and I bet you run into people like I do who don’t know what Lean Construction is. Your experience figuring who gets Lean Construction and who doesn’t is anecdotal and hard to gauge. Thanks to folks at Dassault Systemes and McGraw-Hill a survey was conducted in Sept 2013 to understand the Lean Construction Market. You can get a copy of the study here which requires you to register and will most likely get a call from a sales associate. I did.

One of the eye opening statistics is that 55% of the market doesn’t know Lean Construction, and those who don’t practice Lean Construction have 4X the amount of people thinking they are “efficient/highly efficient.” So, as long as you don’t practice Lean Construction you are unaware of how inefficient you are? How much 4X more the people. This explains the resistance to go Lean. People believe they are already efficient, so why would they change.

If you are in that group that believes you are already efficient and Lean Construction isn’t for you, then ignore the rest of this post.

There in depth interviews with insights from talking to those who use Lean Construction.

Even if you practice Lean Construction you are always looking to learn more.

You use Lean Construction for many benefits. Here is a nice list of benefits.

I was chatting with Compass Data Center’s Chris Crosby about Lean Construction and we were having a good laugh that the media makes it seem like Lean Construction is something new because Facebook and a few others have seen the light of Lean Construction. Lean vs. Waste - Simple vs. Complicated. Chris mentioned the 2 Second Lean book and I went to the website. The company FastCap which 2 Second Lean’s Paul Akers founded is in Bellingham, WA the same city that my Woodstone Oven is made.

A local friend who works in the construction is active in Lean Construction and I saw that a conference he went to has Paul Akers Keynoting. Below is his talk at the conference.

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Some notes I took from the video are:

Paul believes in videos to illustrate points. Check out this F1 pit stop.

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Lean is a choice of being Simple vs. Complicated. Simple & Fun vs. Complicated & Painful. Most places of work are complicated & painful because management doesn’t believe in being Lean.

Lean is simply to see waste and to focus on the teaching and training of the people to eliminate waste. This supports more quality and more value which is good for the customer and good for the business.

Paul tells the story of how he thought the answer was to be organized, but he was clueless compared to the Toyota Production System, Lean Manufacturing, and Kaizen. Now Paul is a speaker and author on the concept of Lean.

Lean Construction is not new. There are probably at least 50% of the construction industry who don’t get Lean. It is a simpler less wasteful way to do work. Lean is greener and more sustainable. But, many think a Lean Construction project is innovative. No it is not innovative. It is about time.