Ima­gine your­self on a con­struc­tion site. A worker is idly wait­ing for ma­ter­i­als to be de­livered. But they haven’t turned up yet. Many times in these cases, people will be afraid to say ‘boss, I have a prob­lem’ be­cause they don’t want to be seen as not work­ing. That wastes time. That’s not LEAN.

LEAN is en­sur­ing that it’s ok to talk to the boss and identify is­sues. As well as solu­tions and sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ment. And LEAN Site Man­age­ment guar­an­tees that the right ma­ter­i­als are at the right place at the right time, in the right amount and right qual­ity.

It is not about re­in­vent­ing the wheel, but rather about op­tim­ising a proven concept and en­sur­ing that the wheel runs smoothly without any in­ter­rup­tions. Which means em­ploy­ing simple meas­ures such as plan­ning and per­form­ance man­age­ment – think­ing about what to do be­fore, dur­ing and after a shift and how to achieve agreed goals.

We call get­ting things right the first time head­ing to­wards ‘True North’. That in­volves cre­at­ing stable work­flows, work­ing with op­timal crew sizes, com­par­ing ac­tual and ex­pec­ted per­form­ance as well as root cause ana­lysis to fur­ther im­prove the pro­cess.