Construction: One Type of Project Production System

The application of lean concepts and techniques to construction often seems to be driven by the idea that construction is, or should be, a type of manufacturing. In the U.S., and broadly in the international community, lean construction has been taken up with the idea that the project is a more fundamental form of production system than the factory. For the author, construction is one of many types of projects for which theorists and practitioners are developing theory and tools, alongside air and sea shipbuilding, performing arts productions, software development, product development, fabrication (job) shops, oil field development, health care delivery and work order systems such as plant maintenance. This paper reports developments in thinking since the author's 1998 IGLC paper on this topic, including a critique of the current model for categorizing production systems, specification of conditions in which job shops can be redesigned as flow lines, a critique of the value concept derived from Gilbreth's model of flow and waste, and the role of buffers in experimentation and learning.

[1]  Jc Johan Wortmann,et al.  Customer-driven manufacturing , 1996 .

[2]  W. J. Stevenson,et al.  PRODUCTION OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT , 1992 .

[3]  S. Spear,et al.  Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System , 1999 .

[4]  Mary Poppendieck,et al.  Lean Software Development , 2007, 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07 Companion).

[5]  Joseph T. Mahoney,et al.  The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota , 1999 .

[6]  Glenn Ballard,et al.  Learning to See Work Flow: Application of Lean Production Concepts to Precast Concrete Fabrication , 2003 .

[7]  Taiichi Ohno,et al.  Toyota Production System : Beyond Large-Scale Production , 1988 .

[8]  David Campbell,et al.  The Relational Theory of Contract : Selected Works of Ian MacNeil , 2001 .

[9]  Lauri Koskela,et al.  An exploration towards a production theory and its application to construction , 2000 .

[10]  James A. Highsmith,et al.  Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems , 1999 .

[11]  Jeffrey K. Liker,et al.  The Toyota way : 14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer , 2004 .

[12]  大野 耐一,et al.  Toyota production system : beyond large-scale production , 1988 .

[13]  藤本 隆宏,et al.  The evolution of a manufacturing system at Toyota , 1999 .

[14]  Mary Poppendieck,et al.  Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit , 2003 .

[15]  Ken Schwaber,et al.  Agile Software Development with SCRUM , 2001 .

[16]  Glenn Ballard,et al.  SLAM — A Case Study in Applying Lean to Job Shops , 2005 .

[17]  Herman Glenn Ballard,et al.  THE LAST PLANNER SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION CONTROL , 2000 .

[18]  Gary Conner,et al.  Lean Manufacturing for the Small Shop , 2001 .