Lean Perspective on Construction

I have been a fan of Larry Rubrich of WCM Associates LLC for a long time admiring his work and enjoying his book, Policy Deployment & Lean Implementation Planning: 10 Step Roadmap to Successful Policy Deployment Using Lean as a System. This book specifically may not make you run out and try to implement policy deployment or the Lean term, Hoshin Kanri rather it is more of a “how to” without being to prescriptive.  

Recently, with my recent interest in Lean Construction, Larry’s name surfaced once again. I discovered he has been working in Lean Construction, since 2003 and had recently published a new book, An Introduction to Lean Construction. In addition, he was hosting several workshops on the subject. His workshops consisted of not only one after the book title but another called, Choosing By Advantages (CBA). From the workshop outline:

CBA is a structured decision-making process that starts when a decision must be made and ends when the decision is implemented and the results evaluated. CBA's basic rule of sound decision-making is: decision must be based on the importance of advantages only. CBA can "Lean Out" the entire decision-making process.

Below is a word cloud and the podcast that I had with Larry about Lean Construction. An excerpt from the podcast is available, 2 Steps to a Lean Culture Change.

 

 

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Larry has over 35 years of experience in engineering and manufacturing in the automotive, industrial, and consumer product areas. He has held the positions of product engineering, chief product engineer, product manager, customer service manager, area manufacturing manager, continuous improvement manager, and plant manager with fortune 100 corporations. Larry spent time in Japan studying Japanese management and manufacturing techniques working directly with top-level Japanese consulting group hired by a U.S. company to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS) in its plants.