LEAN CONSTRUCTION - LUIS ALARCON

In the last two decades, great improvements in performance have been observed in manufacturing. In particular, lean automobile industry is now using less of everything: half the manufacturing space, half the human effort in factory, half the product development time, half the investments in tools. In general, significant improvements in all performance indicators have been observed simultaneously, challenging classic paradigms. All these improvements have not been the product of a radical or sharp change of technology but the result of the application of a new production philosophy which leads to “Lean Production”. The new production philosophy is a generalisation of such partial approaches as JIT, TQM, time-based competition, and concurrent engineering. Its adoption is expected to change almost every industry bringing revolutionary changes to the way we work. So far, in construction, lean production is little known but several companies have started to explore applications of the concepts of lean production to construction. Even if only a small fraction of the gains observed in manufacturing were realised in construction, the incentive to apply these concepts would be tremendous.