Reducing Waste with Lean Delivery featured in Pharma’s Almanac
May 28, 2019
Matthew Khair, Maryland Office Leader/Senior Associate, and J. Lee Emel, Southeast Regional Leader/Senior Associate at CRB are featured in Pharma’s Almanac’s current issue, entitled “Reducing Waste with Lean Delivery in Facility Design and Construction.”
Lean thinking is centered on the successful reduction or complete elimination of waste throughout multiple aspects of a business. Applied to capital projects, lean delivery entails removing redundant or wasteful activities that add time or cost to projects. By applying a lean mindset and fully integrating the delivery team, it is possible to achieve huge savings in schedule, reduced risk and improved cost certainty.
Traditional capital project delivery breaks an overall project into individual scopes of work and fragments the overall project team. Originally built out of a need to implement “checks and balances” on a project, traditional project delivery in its worst applications can devolve into contract-driven, adversarial relationships manifested out of distrust. Priorities are set by individual entities, often in conflict with overall project success, and risk is compartmentalized and fully felt by individual team members.
Implementing a lean mindset in project delivery helps counter some of the unfortunate trends that have grown out of the traditional model. An immediately apparent difference is that risk is more broadly shared in a lean model. Shifting away from a model predicated on rigidly defined terms and expectations ultimately helps reduce conflict that can lead to multiple change orders and consequentially higher costs, among other problems. With an integrated, lean approach to project delivery, everyone involved in the project shares risk — and thus responsibility. This simple distinction can result in a significant cultural shift where all parties are focused entirely on successful delivery with a clear understanding that project success will naturally lead to individual success.
Read the full article here.