Lean Works in Engineering Design too!
Lean, stemming from the Toyota Production System, came directly out of manufacturing. Lean is about shifting management’s focus to provide increased value to the customer and remove all waste.  ‘Value’ is what the customer is actually willing to pay for in the product or service, and is the opposite of waste. (See sidebar for the seven basic types of waste.) Lean is now so pervasive that according to IndustryWeek magazine, 70 percent of all manufacturing companies in the US have implemented Lean. By implementing these principles and techniques, companies have seen improvements like these:

• Manufacturing lead time down to less than one day
• Delivered quality at 3 PPM (parts per million, meaning three defective parts in a million parts)
• Delivery performance on schedule 99+ percent of the time
• Inventory turns greater than 50 turns per year
• Manufacturing space reduced 35 – 50 percent than prior to the changes (1)

The facts are clear – Lean does work in manufacturing.

Service organizations have started implementing Lean. Health care has reported much success in improving patient outcomes and reducing waste.  By applying Lean, the Canada Post plant in Calgary was able to reduce its needed space by 44 percent while increasing productivity from 19 bags handled per hour to 25. They reduced double handling of bags from 46 to 11 percent and reduced the distance each bag travelled within the plant by 714 feet. (2) Lean has been proven to work in service industries.

In the last few years many forward-thinking contractors have also started applying Lean techniques to construction. They have realized as much as 30 percent reductions in project schedules and in budgets. There is enough valid research to demonstrate that Lean works in construction, both in the field installation and in the shop.

Lean is now beginning to be applied in engineering and architectural companies, and they are also realizing its success.  A few examples will help.

Tyco Thermal Controls, the Trace Division Canadian Operations does design and installation of thermal controls. They did a value stream mapping analysis of their engineering design processes. This Lean tool looks at all the steps in a process and distinguishes between steps that add value and those that don’t. The analysis and actions they made to improve allowed them to reduce errors on design drawings by 44 percent, reduce the time the designs were waiting by 57 percent and reduce non-value added activities by 31 percent. The average throughput of designs went from 121 per week to 230 a week. 2D lead-time went from 136 hours to 14.3 hours and 3D lead-time decreased from 160 hours to 22.6 hours. This was without adding staff; in fact the incentive for doing this improvement was the lack of available engineering resources. They estimated a $1.3 million increase in their EBIT annually through this Lean analysis.

A design build mechanical contractor used a Lean tool called a Kaizen Event to focus on eliminating waste in its engineering design process.  It put together a team made up of engineers, CAD and construction operations to review the way designs were processed and identify improvements. They applied the 5S’s to their standards and sorted out-of-date standards from their system, then simplified how the standards and documents are accessed.  Providing a consistent process and getting everyone using the same design standards was something they had always wanted to do, but had not previously been successful.

Areas where Lean can be applied in architecture and engineer are plentiful. Even though design work is highly creative, developing the design to produce a final drawing for construction is a process with many steps that are done for each project. Not all of these steps are value added. One company tracked the days it took for submittals to be approved and found the average time was 22 days. Consider how much of that time is really value added by an engineer/architect's review of submittal and then approving or rejecting it?  Time is money and reducing wait time is reducing waste - an objective of Lean.

While Lean is still relatively new in the AE industry, it is already proving it works here too. As in any effort to apply Lean, the barrier is not in the applicability, but in the openness for people to try.

Sources:
1.  Lean Transformation by Bruce A. Henderson and Jeorge L. Larco, The Oaklea Press, Richmond Virginia, 1999.
2.  Canada Post puts its stamp on a Lean Transformation, by Lean Enterprise, wwwlean.org

Dennis Sowards is a construction industry consultant and guest writer for several industry trade magazines including Contractor Magazine and SNIPS. His company is Quality Support Services, Inc. and can be reached at dennis@YourQSS.com or at (480) 835-1185.


Sidebar
The Seven Types of Waste:

• Defects: It includes doing the wrong installation, defects in fabrication, punch lists and many kinds of change orders.  It includes not meeting the required code; redesign because it fails to meet customer requirements, incorrect pricing; missing information; missed specifications and incomplete drawings. It can include using engineering and design standards that are not current or correct.

• Over-Production of Goods: In construction, this happens when fabricating material too early and when stockpiling material either in the warehouse or at the job site. Estimating jobs that are not won is a form of this waste. Printing more blueprints or making more copies of a report than needed is overproduction. It includes providing more information than the customer or operations needs and creating reports that no one reads.

• Transportation:  This waste happens when material is moved around the shop; is loaded on the truck or trailer; or is hauled to the job site and unloaded.  It also happens when the material is moved from the lay-down or staging area to the installation point or moved to get out of another trade’s area. In the office this includes taking files to another person or to get signatures.

• Waiting: This includes when a crew waits for instructions or materials at the job site; when a fabrication machine waits for material to be loaded; and when payroll waits for the always-late time sheets. It includes an engineer waiting for a customer's response, waiting for the system to come back up or for a handed-off file to be returned.

• Over-processing: This includes over-engineering, requiring additional signatures on a requisition, multiple handling of timesheets, duplicate entry on forms and getting double and triple estimates from suppliers.  It includes repeat manual entry of data and the use of inappropriate software.

• Motion: ‘Treasure hunts’ AKA motion happens when material is stored away from the job or when workers must go looking for tools, material or information. This waste also happens in the office or job site trailer, when looking for files, reports, reference books, drawings, contracts or vendor catalogues.

• Inventory: This includes uncut materials, work in process and finished fabrications. If the material is not yet installed and being used by the customer, it is waste. This includes spare parts, unused tools, consumables, forms and copies, and employee stashes and personal stockpiles.  In the office it also includes files waiting to be worked on, open projects, too many office supplies and unread emails.