What’s Next in Lean Construction

Chris Dierks, Healthy Teams Leader at DPR Construction, has now been to 18 Lean Construction Institute Congresses; back in the day when it was 75 people to almost 1,700 this year. The 2024 event, which wrapped up in San Diego in September, featured four different presentations with DPR team members.

“For whatever reason, this one just felt like one of the best,” Dierks said. “Maybe it’s because more trade partners were involved in several presentations including three of our own. It shows how far Lean has come in the industry and that there’s a very bright future for involving all stakeholders on projects in these presentations.”

In total, nearly three dozen DPR employees attended and, while still sifting through all the learnings, a few key takeaways have the potential to advance Lean practices while also improving outcomes for customers and all project participants.

On a healthcare project in California, Dan Tran, a DPR Project Executive, knew that applying Lean methods was the only way to achieve the customer’s desired schedule—and how that would mean supporting patients in the community faster.

“Our team was selected because we came up with ideas like Design for Manufacture & Assembly (DfMA) and Takt Planning, and both DPR and our design partner had experience with IFOA contracts and were ready to collaborate,” Tran said. “A traditional Design-Bid-Build type of project would have increased the project duration significantly, and making a design without a general contractor's input would not have worked.”

For example, the team quickly validated the project, aligning the scope, budget, and schedule using DfMA and takt to develop multi-purpose posts and headers, and uniform unistrut ceiling attachments that enabled prefabricated interior walls and multi-trade MEP racks.

“The team made a validation study in eight weeks, starting from team alignment to have a coordinated validation package,” Tran said. “That is not normal for this level of complexity; in a traditional setting, this could have taken months. The team has indeed pushed the limits of DfMA and Lean ideas.”

A North Carolina healthcare system had already created standardization within its service lines with a “standard” bathroom pod. When they wanted to implement this level of standardization for headwalls, DPR’s Project Executive Adam Kouri saw an opportunity. He knew the “old” ways of headwall design would create individual headwalls with very specific numbers of data/power/medical gas outlets. That means a high number of modalities, which limited efficiencies with prefabrication or requiring standard headwall construction when there were too little for prefabrication.

“Instead of moving forward without prefabrication, we reviewed the headwall schedule and began modifying it to reduce or add devices to similar modalities,” Kouri said. “We worked with the provider’s clinical teams and began creating standard headwalls that was utilized through different service lines and could be prefabricated.”

Instead of prefabricating 256 headwalls that would work for only one phase of the project, the team prefabricated 523 that could be used throughout the campus, which Kouri estimates saved the customer more than $300,000.

A global pharmaceutical firm took several years to examine the benefits of different forms of delivery for an upcoming construction project. What they found was that delivery methods like integrated project delivery (IPD) unlocked Lean practices that increased work output predictability, shortened project schedules and increased quality of delivery.

“It can be tough to break the mold and rethink project delivery and the decision-making process, and to give IPD a chance,” said Andres Robles, a DPR Project Executive who worked on an IPD project for the pharma customer. “But for larger scale, more complex projects, it’s a game changer.”

Specifically, Robles thinks the project benefitted from its collaborative approach to unlock target value delivery.

“We started the project early, we had significantly fewer change orders and RFIs [requests for information] and TVD created budget benefits that we simply couldn’t have achieved without an integrated form of delivery contract,” said Robles said.

Getting there takes having the owner team set up the right way to support it, covering all disciplines.

“That can be challenging for owner teams,” the pharma firm participant noted. Through sharing results, the hope is for more companies to take a look at IPD.

Simply implementing Lean processes may yield some value. Spending time to train project team members on how to make the most of Lean methods, focusing on both technical and social aspects, can yield exceptionally more value. At least that’s what research by El Asadian, a DPR Project Engineer, uncovered in research for her PhD. Her thesis, The Impact of Lean Methods on Construction Team Dynamics, completed at Penn State looked at three projects all using the Last Planner System and their outcomes.

“Findings indicate that teams with higher LPS [Last Planner System] maturity levels consistently adhere to LPS technical procedures, foster stronger social interactions, and achieve better team dynamics,” Asadian said. “This all contributed to improved project outcomes.”

While it seems obvious that more training on a tool would have positive results, what was especially notable was that teams that took more time to learn how to work effectively in the LPS—by engaging in components such as Percent Plan Complete (PPC), identifying and tracking project constraints, and using visual management for information sharing developed stronger social connections, which led to better overall collaboration. And team building alone, long a staple for project teams of all sizes, did not correlate to better use of LPS without being paired with focused training. To support project teams in assessing their LPS implementation, Asadian and her research partners developed an LPS Maturity Model. This model provides a structured roadmap for improvement.

“The upshot is, LPS is not set-it-and-forget-it, at least if you want to realize the most value,” Asadian said. “Project teams—owners, designers, contractors, key partners—need to go beyond basic execution and really examine best practices with LPS from things like in-meeting interactions, resources for training and coaching as well as how plans are tracked fort accountability.”