Do the methods put into action during emergencies-like COVID-19-provide lessons for conventional builders? The Lean Construction Institute’s Kristin Hill thinks so.
Rapid response construction and engineering has long been a tool to meet the demands of unexpected crises such as hurricanes and earthquakes, military engagements and, more recently, the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic.
While the benefits of rapid response construction may be obvious in a crisis, there are lessons to be learnt from its methods that can help Australia’s property and construction industry to increase responsiveness and complete projects ahead of schedule and under budget.
Lean construction and rapid-response building
Lean Construction is a system designed to streamline the construction process by foregrounding open communication and collaboration between teams throughout the project lifecycle. Lean emphasises working together to set expectations and align design specifications before construction begins.
According to figures provided by the Lean Construction Institute, projects with high lean intensity are about twice as likely to be completed under budget and three times more likely to be completed ahead of schedule, compared to the outcomes of conventionally-managed projects.
According to the Institute’s director of education programs, Kristin Hill, this is because lean construction emphasises team cohesion.
“With rapid response building, planning is particularly critical,” Hill says. “Being able to have the team plan together, to know what they’re going to do together and go out in the field and execute is so important.”
The last planner system
To achieve this group cohesion, the team at the Lean Construction Institute has developed the “Last Planner System“. This holistic collaborative planning process creates a flow of information between teams in the lead-up to field work.
The system was developed by Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard, who studied construction project teams using conventional methodologies and discovered that, on average, just 54 per cent of a team’s goals were accomplished in any given week.
“This was usually because some prerequisite material or work had not been done or there was missing information,” Hill explains.
Discovering this information gap inspired Howell and Ballard to create the Last Planner System, which enhances the reliability of a project team’s plan by as much as 90 per cent.
By increasing communication during the design phase and ensuring that designers and tradespeople are working together, the process is streamlined and design choices are made based on efficiency and responsiveness.
“Instead of a design being ‘thrown over the wall’ to a team to execute, the constructors have an intimate understanding of what’s being built earlier on and can mobilise faster,” Hill says.
Encouraging efficiency in material use
Using a “just in time” system, Lean projects ensure that materials are exactly where they need to be when they are needed.
“Instead of materials being brought for the whole project, dumped on the site and moved around – which costs time, money and affects quality and safety – materials are brought closer to the point in time they’re needed and rapidly moved to the location that they’re going to be used most,” Hill explains.
Using prefabricated components can also bolster efficiency in the build stage of construction.
“The more we are prefabricating, the more work that can be happening simultaneously in a factory-like setting and then brought to the site and installed.”
Communication
The most important lesson is to recognise the importance of team-wide communication, Hill says.
“When the team is aligned– and when they’ve co-developed the work together – there are no requests for information and they can move to the details much more rapidly.”
Read on for other ways the Lean methodology can apply to construction.