Although the term lean construction was coined in 1993, the “lean” concept can arguably trace its origins to the successful Toyota Production System (TPS). Created by Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro Toyoda and Toyota chief engineer Taiichi Ohno, the TPS focused on eliminating waste by offering strategies to improve a company’s quality and performance. Seven different wastes were identified throughout the manufacturing process, including costly overproduction, unnecessary motion and product transportation.
B&I Contractors —an employee owned, large-scale commercial mechanical contractor headquartered in Fort Myers, Florida — rolled out its own lean strategic initiative about two years ago, based on the innovative Toyota method. The goal: to empower B&I workers to recognize manageable ways to eliminate waste throughout their daily processes.
“We’re obviously not building cars here, but it’s the same ideas,” said Jon Castro, sheet metal department manager at B&I Contractors. “If we pull some of those good work practices and apply them to the construction industry, it can really revolutionize how people are constructing things.”
A major component of B&I’s lean initiative is prefabrication and preassembly. Recently, the creation of the MEP system for the Cleveland Clinic Florida relied heavily on both.
“That is lean whether you know you’re doing it or not because you’re preassembling a product in a controlled environment,” Castro said.
For the project, B&I utilized an off-site facility nearby to design and install 48 steel racks. Detailed shop drawings allowed the crew to maintain critical requirements for the location of system parts within the racks. Multi-trade installation was performed at ground level, which allowed workers to build more quickly and efficiently. On installation day, cranes were utilized to lift the racks to their respective floors and removable casters to easily roll the racks to their proper locations. Overall, B&I’s prefabrication and preassembly strategies resulted in minimal waste, reduced cost and a significantly shortened installation time for the project at Cleveland Clinic Florida.
“It’s not about saving money — it’s really about the end user and the customer,” Castro said. “When you’re improving your quality and reducing waste through lean, it’s a better product for the customer.”
Castro credits the company’s early success in implementing lean philosophies not with the management, but with the early adopters in the workforce.
“Lean doesn’t happen in the office at a meeting. It comes from the guys in the trenches slugging it out every day,” Castro said. “It’s the ideas from the guys working in the field, and people in my position promoting their ideas and their good habits. You definitely don’t change a culture overnight, but it’s starting to take a foothold in the company.”