The tao of lean construction

Lean philosophy & Construction

Tao is the path is a Chinese word signifying "way", "path". Its a science and the path of learning by reducing waste.  Its similar to lean and its philiosphy to reduce waste of resources namely time, manpower and material, to create the most value out of a given system. Lean principles were initially developed as a way to optimize workflows in production lines in Manufacturing Plants but later on, expanded across businesses and evolved as a way of thinking and acting for entire organizations.

The productivity revolution that has transformed sectors like manufacturing, agricultural, etc has largely left the construction industry untouched. In fact, productivity has stagnated over the past two decades with delays and cost overruns being a common theme among projects. This is where adopting a lean philosophy can help the projects. Lean boosts productivity by enabling better collaboration between the project stakeholders, provides strong performance management for execution of the project and focuses on improving the capabilities of the people in the frontline.

Lean + Construction + Technology = The holy grail of productivity

The latest innovations in the construction industry like cloud-based platforms, productivity tracking, real-time analytics can be used to augment lean construction. Here, technology acts as a force multiplier for lean by providing visibility to your project across multiple dimensions like cost, manpower, and material on a real-time basis. This gives the project team a unique opportunity to mitigate possible delays and recover wasted time.

Collaborating with people made easier - Connecting people across

One distinct way that lean processes are different from the traditional methods is that they facilitate a framework for stronger collaboration between the stakeholders because more often than not the reason for project failure is lack of trust and misalignment of project goals. One way Kwant helps in furthering the collaboration is by providing multiple avenues to access the lookahead schedule, from the iPad and iPhone apps for the supers and foremen to do updates easily from the field to the project executive using kwant’s cloud-based platform to view the PPC trend over a period of time.

Improve productivity by analyzing wastes in a project

One important part of lean construction is knowing how the resources are being utilized on-site and eliminating the waste occurring. Kwant sensors provide real-time information on the location of the worker on-site, his clock in & clock out time. This data is then analyzed in conjunction with the project schedule to predict out of sequence activities, determine productivity rates of the crew to estimate future manpower requirements. At the end of the week, the platform automatically syncs with payroll thus eliminating the need for tedious paperwork.

Real-time insights driving continuous learning  

Continuous improvement and reflecting on what went wrong previously is the hallmark of any system and lean construction embraces it. In the near future, Kwant would provide an analysis of different types of waste that have occurred during the previous lookaheads based on the data collected from the sensors. For example, our algorithms can detect patterns from the movement of the workers to identify wasted motion and suggest better pathways to improve overall site logistics and the reduce the time wasted, you can determine the effective utilization of large capital items like hoists, tower cranes in the construction site and make decisions backed up by data, enhance safety on site by alerting the project team in case a worker enters unsafe zones.

These possibilities of lean construction hitherto remained unexplored due to technological constrains of the past, now with our latest innovations we can maximize the benefits that lean construction has to offer. Join us in unleashing the productivity revolution on the construction industry.