Guideline of lean critical success factors implementation in construction project

Abstract

Lean consists of a collection of principles and tools which aim to identify and eliminate waste. Lean practices aim to maximize value to the customer or client, while minimizing waste and deploying continuous improvement in manufacturing, construction or business industry. Construction projects are complex and require a rigorous application of project management embedded with Lean principles to reduce the waste in construction industry. Many researches have been done in construction but few have involved studies on implementation of Lean Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in case studies to measure the effectiveness of the Lean CSF. In this research, an investigation is carried out into the implementation of Lean CSF in Iran, to improve construction site performance, within Iranian construction industry. Unfortunately, in Iran there are few research projects on Lean in building construction but non on implementation of Lean CSFs in the construction industry. This research has three objectives; 1) To evaluate the current awareness and attitudes of the construction experts towards the existence of waste in construction projects and opportunity for implementing Lean principle in the construction site within the Iranian construction industry. 2) To evaluate and identify the Lean critical success factors in order to implement the Lean construction management principle in building construction site. 3) To propose a guideline for implementing the Lean critical success factors on construction project site and to evaluate the productivity of construction project site before and after the implementation of Lean. For achieving the first objective, questionnaire-survey based on Likert scale is used for collecting data and the data is analyzed by Ranking Indices of Importance (RII). The questionnaires are used to analyze the waste and Lean situation in the construction site, by seven main categories; waste, continuous improvement, material supplying (just-in-time), supplying collaboration, standardization, value flow and attitude. It is designed for two groups of top managers and senior engineers. The result showed that there is awareness of waste in construction industry. For the second objective, two CSFs are identified. The first one is 5S which is selected based on literature review, and for second CFS, a questionnaire-survey using Delphi, and Fuzzy AHP is employed. Based on the results Last Planner System (LPS) is selected. For the third objective, Function Analysis System Technique (FAST) diagram is used to develop guideline for implementing the LPS and 5S. After implementing FAST diagram, Pareto is then applied to analyze the outcomes of proposed guideline. After implementation of the guideline, another questionnaire is conducted among the top managers and senior engineers using T-square method to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing LPS and 5Ss on construction productivity. This is to validate the proposed guideline. The results have shown that Lean CSFs in particular, LPS and 5S can improve the productivity of construction.