Читать книгу The Construction Technology Handbook - Hugh Seaton - Страница 19

Car manufacturing in Japan is actually where all of “Lean” came from – based on the innovations of Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno, the bosses of Toyota motor company in the years after World War II. Faced with almost no capital in a capital‐intensive industry, workers with limited skills in a skills‐intensive industry, and almost unbeatable competition from Detroit in a competitive market, Toyoda and Ohno had to find a new way of looking at their business.

They did this by going back to first principles, and questioning everything about how cars were manufactured, to see how they might invent a new way. The first thing they questioned was how success was measured on the factory floor – traditionally this had been driven by the fact that the big pressing and assembly line machines were (and still are), enormously expensive. So the goal from a financial standpoint was always to make sure you maximize return on investment (ROI).

Following this ROI mindset, traditional car company managers and floor operators worked to make sure that each machine was used as much as possible, which meant producing as many parts produced per hour as possible, so the cost of the machine could be spread out across those parts. In this ROI‐centered mindset, managers valued machine efficiency more than the efficiency of the whole process.

Think about what that means if you have, say, five machines in a row making a screwdriver. The first one extrudes wire, cuts it, and passes it on. The next one bangs the front end into a flat blade, and bangs the back end to make little anchors. Step three dips the metal rod into a plastic mold to create the handle. Step four applies paint and glazing, and step five polishes and preps the newly minted screwdriver for packaging.

Remember that the classic way to look at this process is that we wanted to run each machine as much as possible, to our magical ROI. What if each machine, each part of the process is a different speed, producing a different number of outputs per hour? What if one of the early processes wasn't producing high quality parts, that then went through the rest of the process?

Obviously this happens all the time, and most pre‐Lean factories were a mess of waste and quality issues as a result.

Back to our screwdrivers example, what happens when you run all the machines at top speed, each producing as much as possible, is you get lots of metal rods sitting around, waiting for the plastic molding step, or you get lots of half‐finished screwdrivers waiting for the polish step. That gums up the factory floor, costs money in inventory, and pulls focus from what the factory is really supposed to be doing, which is making things people want to pay for.

It has been reported in more than one study that over 90% of construction supervisors think their jobsites are inefficient – clearly some of the same issues that pre‐Lean manufacturing faced are going on at our jobsites.

The pre‐Lean mindset was to focus on getting the most out of the machines, when it should have been making the most defect‐free products as possible. The machines cost what they cost, whether you run them 100% or 50%. That's fixed. But you can control how much inventory you've created, and if you're focused on the whole process, you're going to ask if each machine really needs to be set at 100% speed, or maybe if you can balance things so that each step only makes enough for the next step.

Managers who understand the lean mindset understand that the factory's job is not to make the most of its machines. The factory's job is to make the most of its process, of its total collection of workers, materials, and machines.

The real change, though, is in the role of top‐down versus bottom‐up planning. You see, once that mindset was changed, it was realized that front line workers understand the day‐to‐day process much better than managers, so they were given authority to stop the line and make adjustments, set short‐term plans and make improvements.

These same workers were collected into small groups, called “quality circles,” who would meet frequently and talk about how their parts of the process could be improved – usually this part included several adjacent steps. And finally, tons of data was collected on how the process overall was going so opportunities that improve at that level could be seen and decisions made.

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, Lean thinking took Japan from a burned out, poverty‐stricken country to one of the leading economies in the world.

Keep in mind, the Lean manufacturing folks never stopped worrying about ROI for their machines. And you'd better believe that no one worried one bit less about safety or the always‐present possibility that something unexpected will go wrong. What they did do was expand the tools they knew how to use well, and create some new ones, especially around data.

The Lean Construction example helps us in two ways:

First, it is a great example of how changing mindset changed what managers and workers thought of as most valuable. And when that happened, new processes, new opportunities for improvement came about. In fact, Lean swept around the world and changed what everyone thinks is valuable in manufacturing.

Imagine what is happening in construction now – we are slowly adopting a digital mindset, and it is unlocking new ways of looking at everything. Specific solutions and technologies will come and go; what matters is how you, the construction professional, are able to view these technologies and make them work for you. In the case of Lean Manufacturing, over seven decades of technology have changed everything about what happens in a factory, but the core ideas and methods are the same as they were in the 1950s.

How you think about the world affects what you are able to do; what you value drives what you choose to do.

Secondly, Lean illustrates an important concept – some of the most important tools you use are in your own mind. In the case of Lean, those tools included using data and statistics, but also the habit of asking folks on the floor what was going on, instead of being quite so top‐down, command and control. Those same tools are used in Lean Construction, as we'll discuss later.

Mindset is a powerful thing. We are creating a digital mindset that will usher in a new era of construction.