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The construction industry has been criticized for its poor productivity levels, high cost of rework, and command and control approach to job site coordination and planning. A recent international study indicates that the measured direct costs of avoidable errors are in the order of 5% of the project value. To address these issues, construction companies can take practical measures to reduce rework costs and begin the journey to a high-performance culture.
The construction sector spends billions yearly on the cost of poor quality, rework, and error, with wide-ranging impacts and root causes. These include outdated and ineffective planning, communication, and coordination throughout the Design and Construction phases, inadequate attention to quality originating from increasing cost and schedule pressures, and poorly executed supervision.
To harvest the low-hanging fruit from the poor productivity tree, construction leaders must make problem finding a celebrated behavior, short interval control drives fast interval learning, and process confirmation today prevents process error tomorrow. By making problem finding a notable behavior, leaders can spend less time on firefighting and more time coaching their army of problem solvers.
Lower the Cost of Construction
Short interval control drives fast learning by visualizing performance and measuring production at the most lacking control interval by properly deploying the Last Planner System* (Collaborative Planning) and Tiered Visual Performance Management. This approach to Lean planning stimulates improvement opportunities through short learning cycles, which, when acted upon, promptly drive improvements in productivity, reliability, and quality
Process confirmation prevents tomorrow’s process error by capturing, containing, and controlling error at its point of cause and permanently addressing the root causes. Moving to 100% inspection is different than the solution to the rework crisis in the construction industry, as it adds high costs and schedule pressures to an already stretched environment.
Achieving high-quality performance requires more than robust processes; leaders must set the culture and lead the change. To develop the culture, make the principle of Right First Time a way of thinking and empower employees to take pride in their work. This mindset is the baseline from which Leaders can add more complex systems to reduce and eliminate errors from occurring, such as Andon support, Standardized Working Methods, and Error Proofing.
Leading the change involves making Process Confirmation & Go, Look, See a mandatory placeholder in the weekly Leadership standard diary. Process confirmation is not an audit but a coaching opportunity to set transparent process & performance expectations, role model the value of standardization & process discipline, and understand how employees think. Go, Look, See should be done with purpose, intent, and desire to see the waste for yourself and seek understanding by showing respect and asking why.