From the course: Construction Management: Introduction to Lean Construction

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What is lean?

What is lean?

From the course: Construction Management: Introduction to Lean Construction

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What is lean?

- As I said earlier, construction has been historically stuck at the craft theory of production. Again, craft production is characterized as a build-to-order approach delivering one-off custom products at high cost and low volume. It uses a highly skilled workforce using flexible and relatively simple tools with quality achieved through tinkering and rework. This certainly seems to fit construction, right? This is a fairly accurate description of our process. Yes, I know we've improved some of our tools and started utilizing some more complex equipment but as a whole, we are really still stuck in that craft theory of production. Okay, I've used that phrase theory of production several times now and I think it's important to understand that concept of a theory of production. I believe that in order to make big changes, changes like we've seen in the manufacturing industry, we need to adopt a new theory. When manufacturing went from craft to assembly line, it was revolutionary but it…

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