Lean & 5S' in Construction #12 July 2006

Lennox Does Lean

I had the opportunity to visit the Lennox plant in Stuttgart, Arkansas to witness first hand their lean application.  Of particular interest was their sheet metal fabrication processes.  They have about 1300 employees and each employee participates in two Kaizen (continuous improvement) events each year.  Here are some of their lean applications:

• Redesigned sheet metal handling so that the sheets being moved flow down (towards the ground) not up. This avoids strains and sprains.
• Built special carts for all types of uses. The carts store fabricated sheet metal vertically.  The carts hold four hours of material for fabrication and assembly and a new cart is brought in every four hours.  Carts must require no more than 30 pounds of force to move.
• Moved painting out of the plant. They buy their entire sheet metal and parts already painted.
• Designed tables and stands that do not allow material or parts to be stored below 24 inches from the floor. The tables rise up, as parts are unpacked so the worker doesn’t bend over excessively. Space below 24” is blocked off so nothing can be stored there.
• They try to put all material and parts within what they call the “ belly up to arm deep” zone.
• Used the 5S’s to make sure everything has a place and is marked as such.  They do a 5S’s evaluation before and after each Kaizen event so they can see improvement.
• Color-coded lines of work and the carts that go with each line.
• Moved air hoses and power cords off the floor.
• Designed racks for parts and material storage so they are loaded from one side and pulled from the other. They also relocated the racks so they are not loaded from the traffic aisle.
• Standardized the work at each station and measured it by time studies.
• Measured the actual distance in feet that the material and/or the worker moves during each process step.  In most Kaizen events they have reduced this distance substantially.
• Parts are delivered and ready to use at point-of-use in the process.  Parts are unpacked before being sent to the lines so that workers don’t spend time unpacking and handling packing material.
• Use ‘spiders’ to deliver the parts to the work areas.
• Taken much WIP inventory out of the process.
• Looked at scrap sheet metal to determine where additional parts could be fabricated.
• Standardized the size of holes they punched in sheet metal from over 200 to just a few.
• Developed a flip table so when they work on both sides of the sheet metal, they flip the table not the sheet metal itself.
• Glued a tape measure to a rack so they didn’t have to measure with a hand tape measure for each cut.
• Located tools right next to where they are needed so the worker doesn’t have to search for them.
• Leveled the workflow – they only fabricate three days a week to match assembly’s capacity.
• Used simple work sheets and process analysis to make the invisible (waste) visable.

They did much more but I was not able to capture all their Lean improvements.

Lean was not welcomed at this plant with open arms when first introduced five years ago but the Lean leaders and plant management have stayed the course. Now most employees are eager to participant in lean improvements.

What have they achieved by all this?

• They have gone from having 20 days to 7 day of inventory of parts on hand.
• Reduced 78 positions in the work area. All workers were redeployed; none were laid off due to the Lean effort.
• Grown the business by a factor of four without adding factory space.
• Converted 34 parts to now be made from scrap.
• Reduced by 50% their order-to-ship cycle time.
• Reduced the time it took from a release-to-ship a finished product, to the time it was actually on the truck and in route, from three days to less than one day.

Project Management – A better Way

The one Lean construction tool that was not directly developed by the manufacturing world is the Last Planner System (LPS) * The LPS is a process of planning and preparing the work done weekly by the crews and a learning to reduce barriers and roadblocks. The ‘Last Planner’ is the foreman or field supervisor that assigns the crew their actual work each day. This is the real last planner of the work. The key elements of the LPS are:

• Phased Plan
• Look-ahead Plan
• Weekly Work Plan
• Weekly meetings
• Variance Report & PPC

We will explore these elements in detail in future newsletters. Consider the following as you wonder how the LPS fits into Lean and construction.

There are two approaches or strategies for managing and running projects.

The approach typically used today could be called the Flexibility Approach.   Field crews faced with an ongoing unpredictable workflow adopt a strategy of flexibility to keep busy. They are constantly being moved around to do different tasks because something wasn't ready or did not happen and the work they had intended to do is not doable.  While being flexible is a good skill to master and most of our foremen are able to do this very well, flexibility applied at one part of the job demands flexibility downstream. This injects greater uncertainty in the flow of work and makes planning almost impossible.  We can't plan because the crew or work before us is not planned because the work before them was not plannable, so we all are flexible.  This is at great cost to the company.

The alternative approach is the Last Planner System.  LPS starts by stabilizing the workflow through reliable planning.  When done right it shields the crew from much of the uncertainty we cannot control. By increasing certainty into the flow of work, the performance of the immediate crew improves by up to 30% or more.  This also stabilizes flow downstream. Predictable flow at any point in the supply and installation chain makes it possible to reduce variation upstream and delays downstream. The LPS techniques have been proven in both design and construction, on small and larger design-build or competitively bid, as well as very large fast-track projects.

If you are tired of the stress and hassle of the flexibility strategy, then the Last Planner is the way to go.

What has LPS saved? Consider one example:  At TDIndustries, Jim Teston * did his master thesis for Clemson University on comparing using the LPS to the way they always managed projects.   He researched 50 jobs all over $300,000 in labor. Eleven jobs used LPS and the rest used the traditional project management approach.  The findings of his research are that Jobs not using Last Planner System had a productivity ratio of 0.97 (they beat their estimate by 3%). Jobs that used the LPS had an average productivity ratio of 0.88 or they beat their estimates by 12%.  Jim quantified this saving to be that LPS saved 17% of their Projects' labor budget. This calculated to a savings of $1,511,544!

What would a 17% savings in labor mean to your projects? In today’s scarce skilled labor market, doing jobs with less labor is an additional competitive advantage. Learn more about the LPS and more examples of what it has saved in future issues.

* Source: Jim Teston's master thesis at Clemson University:  Evaluating the Benefits of Lean Construction on Productivity, August 1998.

* Last Planner System is a trademark of the Lean Construction Institute.

Quick Change-Over Opportunities

Quick change-over is one Lean tool that has yet to be used much in construction. I feel that is mostly because we, in construction, tend to discount anything that looks like manufacturing.  It really can be useful to construction. Quick change can be applied in the field where we have the daily set up and clean up of the job.  A CII estimate that 33% of the crew’s time is spent in set up/make ready and clean up support work.  Why does it take so long – mainly because no one has really studied how we do it and thus each crew sets up and cleans up much like workers did it fifty years ago.  There are no standard ways to set things up, there are no standard places to put things out or up. It’s everyone to his on way. What if we attached this time like race car teams do pit stops?  How much time could be saved for more productive work? It's not just at the job sites, what about set up & clean up for service trucks? When technicians go to a job, how much of their time goes for getting ready to do the repair and clean up afterwards?  Some are much more efficient than others, so why not find out how they do it and replicate it to all technicians?  A good rule of thumb is that everything in a service truck should be arranged and marked so that any worker could find a needed part or tool in 30 seconds or less.

Learning Opportunities

You may be interested in attending one of these training seminars:

• Aug. 23, 2006 – Lean Works in Construction – Kansas City, MO – Kansas City SMACNA Chapter

A Quick Thought

When they run one-piece production, they can’t have quantity that they want so everybody gets frustrated and doesn’t know what to do. But then, within that, they have to find ways to think, what is the way to get the quantity? That is the true essence of TPS * and, in that sense, we create confusion so we have to do something different in approaching this problem.  Teruyuki Minoura, Former President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, North America

TPC = Toyota Production System or Lean.

This e-newsletter is written by Dennis Sowards to share ideas on the 5S’s and Lean practices especially as they are applied in construction.  If you have ideas or lessons learned to share please contact me.

For more information about Lean applications to construction and especially the 5S’s contact Dennis Sowards at his office at 480-835-1185 or his cell at 602-740-7271 or at his web site: www.YourQSS.com