Transcript: Lean Construction Institute Congress Recap: Part 2

Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. Hi, I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turter, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. First of all, thank you for making it all the way to episode 50 with me. My loyal listeners always share, they're always giving me feedback, recommendations on new guests.

I don't know, I just can't thank you guys enough. I'm really grateful also, I got 18 reviews as of this past week. I really feel honored to be sharing the message of reducing uncertainty, building trusting relationships, and integrating technology in our projects. As you know, we have lots of work to repair this industry, and it really starts with you as an individual to make a difference. The resounding responses that I get from my guests about how to basically shift your mindset from today's thinking is really just find a really small way to start, get buy-in, and build a network of people that are thinking more along the lines of where you want to go.

On my 50th episode, I have to say that I get the opportunity to talk about one of the communities that have supported me on this journey of finding out how to reduce uncertainty the entire project, and that is the Lean Construction Institute. If you don't know too much about them yet, listen to today's episode, you'll get a sense of what Lean Construction is all about. So today is the second week for the Lean Construction Institute Congress recap. We kicked it off last week with a one-on-one interview with keynote speaker, Karen Martin.

We, last week we talked about why organizations don't have clarity, some of the pitfalls of not seeing a clear foundation and relying on ambiguous goals. And so lastly, we talk about some of those recommendations that Karen has for better organizational clarity, whether it be organizations or project teams. So if you haven't listened to it yet, check it out at constructor.com slash ep49, and learn more about how getting clarity first in organizations really sets you up for success. So today we're gonna talk with five guests, but I wanted to just give you guys a sense of what I was trying to get at when I was interviewing these guests.

I went in there and I said, you know what? I'm gonna find out like the really specific tools and techniques that people are using, whether it's in lean design, leaner construction, how are they building their business cases for utilizing lean, right? What are the metrics? Give me some hard data, right? So the responses were incredible, okay?

Now, but what I would like to do before we get to those responses is give you a sense of what the planning goals were for this particular Congress. The last several Congresses have grown on the order of 20 to 25% each year. So this is Greg Zingberg. He was the planning committee chair for the Congress by 20% up to 1500 plus participants, which is tremendous. Any organization would be excited to have that kind of growth, but we've also been very focused on making sure that as the Congress has grown over the last couple of years, that the quality continues to grow, that the program grows to support the greater interest and make sure that people are getting a proper return for coming to the Congress.

Because we've gone from what was a very intimate affair, what is really quite a large affair, but we want to still maintain those intimate moments within. The other key thing is that as lean in general becomes more mainstream, it's very important that companies can recognize and see the business case for lean. And so we've encouraged our presenters to make sure that they're thinking about the metrics that define whether or not the processes and culture that they've put in place has helped to make them more successful.

This year, there's an extra emphasis on that, was the empirical data that supports that their lean journey has benefited the companies that they work for. So you can really tell that the Lean Construction Institute- The numbers are growing, and that was also a really important element to our planning effort- And I will really align in what we were trying to document. Was to make sure that we had participation from owners, design companies, and then also our trade partners, because our trade partners are also typically underrepresented.

This year, we had targets of 11% across the board. For all three, we've actually hit, I believe in the trade partners, we're up to 14%. Owners are on the order of 12 or 13. We're very proud that we hit our goals as the Congress continues to grow. Because when you think about the numbers of people that are out there, while it's a gigantic industry, certainly the predominant number of people are either in the general contractors or in the trades.

Having those good levels of participation as we grow as an organization are critical to making sure that those voices are heard, the experiences are shared, we're able to see lean take greater hold within the industry. You may hear some applause or some voices in the background. Bear in mind, we were doing the interviews in the hallway, but I really do feel that that kept the energy high. So let's keep listening to what Greg has to say. One other important element to that is, when we were soliciting presentations, abstracts for this Congress, we scored based on how much participation there was from the entire team.

Because typically we get presentations primarily from general contractors. And this year, if someone had an owner as a participant in the team, or a design partner as a participant in the team, they were scored significantly higher. And so you'll see throughout the Congress this year that the teams that are presenting represent owners, architects, and the construction team in a manner that we probably have not done in the past. So you know, this was great news for me. I didn't realize how much the focus had shifted to team collaboration.

And I think that's so essential, especially from the owner's perspective, as you know, the Constructor Podcast is dedicated to, you really have to really get upfront into the pre-construction phase, inception phase at that prior to design, to really understand how the inner workings of the team develop into a successful project. So before we actually move into talking with our next guests, who do happen to be from the design community, I did wanna give a synopsis, my perception of the keynote speech that Patrick Lencioni has done.

All right, so I'm gonna hit these topics quick, but I really want you to get them. First and foremost, organizational health is completely transformative and it enables success. So what does that mean essentially? You need to have strong leadership and the characteristics of leadership. Doesn't matter what part of the organization they are, they need to have two components.

Number one component is that they need to be smart. What does smart mean? It means that need to be good at decision making sciences, which are strategy, marketing, finance and technology. All right, so that's what being smart is. Component two is the organization has to be healthy.

There needs to be minimal politics and confusion, high morale, high productivity and low turnover. All right, so we've hit the two components of the leadership, right? They have to be smart and they have to be healthy. Following the key components of leadership, Patrick went into what the five behaviors are that leading teams need to master and there are five of them, okay? So I'm gonna go through them pretty quickly.

Number one, as a foundational approach, you need to have trust. How do you get trust? Trust only comes when teams, partners in the team are being vulnerable. All right, so he goes through this amazing example. Let me give it to you really quick.

There's a CEO, he went through this assessment process asking his team to give him feedback on his performance. They do written assessments. They, he gets the feedback. He decides he wants to sit down and talk verbally with his team at a meeting just to make sure that he's doing the right thing. He sits down and he reads off.

I have poor listening skills. And he goes to the team. Do I have poor listening skills? What do you guys think? And they respond, oh, I think you listen fine.

You're fine at listening. You're good, you're good. Oh, he's like, okay, all right, next one. Thanks. I have problems with recognizing performance.

What do you guys think? Do I have problems with recognizing performance? Then they go, oh, you're fine with recognizing. I think you're fine. I feel fine.

Yeah, no problem. So imagine how the rest of the conversation went. Okay. A year or two down the line. I don't remember the timeline, but Patrick goes into detail.

Whatever the case might be, company fails. And in the news reports, it says that they had product issues and strategic errors. Do you really think that those are the reasons why the company has failed? Patrick highlighted that ultimately has nothing to do with that. No one trusted each other.

And because they didn't work through those issues, it was inevitable that there was gonna be a failure in the end. So that's the topic of trust. Next item, number two, conflict. Conflict without trust is competitive. So you really do have to have that foundational layer.

Conflict is the unveiling of honesty. And if you have trust, you're always gonna get to the truth. If you fail at having disagreements about issues, you enter into the realm of disregarding them as a person or someone's not being respectful or they're pretty much douche. So if people don't weigh in on a decision, they won't buy into the decision, right? So you have to give people the opportunity to have that dialogue.

Demand that people engage in conflict. So the next item is commitments. You have to make decisions on your commitments and follow through. If people don't buy in, they'll passively commit and they'll watch the train wreck. So in order to enable that commitment, you really do have to have those two foundational things, first trust, then conflict, productive conflict in order to commit.

Fourth thing, accountability. You have to make sure you hold each other accountable. Peer pressure works on a good team. Leaders also have to hold people accountable. There are leaders who believe that they don't have time to hold people accountable for their behaviors, but you really can't act that way because at this point, everyone has to keep, the entire team, including the leader, has to keep the entire team accountable.

Last one, results. If there's inattention to results, then you'll never know if you've actually achieved your goals. So that's my recap of Patrick Lancioni's speech. Again, if you haven't checked out his books, look Patrick Lancioni up. He's been consulting on leadership for a while and he has loads of value.

They're actually fictional books that suck you in about organizational dynamics. And if you're like me, you'll love them. So next up, you'll be hearing from Bernita Bikeman and Andrea Sponsal. They're both working at HKS. They'll be telling us about their perceptions of Patrick Lancioni's speech and what they learned.

First up is Andrea. One of my key takeaways was that it's not important necessarily to get true consensus from the group, but to ensure that you're actually including everyone in the decision-making process and not just getting passive acceptance for something that can lead to greater conflict in the future if you haven't taken the time to hear everyone out. And now, here from Bernita. A lot of what he talked about, trust on the team and that talking about trust isn't necessarily the same as true trust and being comfortable with conflict is important and real accountability is different than what really people talk about accountability is.

I really like the fact that Bernita picked up that the definitions of these terms are not what we typically think about when we use these terms like trust, conflict and commitments and accountability. All of them, which they're really set up in a pyramid and Patrick Lancioni had some really great graphics to help visualize it, but trust stayed at the bottom and you really can't go anywhere without trust and obviously conflict, commitments, accountability, layered on top and then results was the last. So imagine that in your mind and imagine those are the only ways that this model can actually work.

For the rest of this initial segment, you'll be hearing from Bernita, Andrea and Greg. We're gonna just kind of take a step back and introduce Greg a little bit more. All we know so far is he was the planning committee chair. My name's Greg Zinberg. I am a vice president with Clark Construction in operations, I've always been in operations, chasing, building and finishing large projects.

Been with Clark for 22 years, worked around the country. So I asked Greg how does he actually utilize lean at Clark Construction in his role? For me personally, when I look at lean, I really think about how it empowers my project team to do more, to do better, to be more efficient, to be more cohesive. I try to stick to the basics and I think about the three core principles of lean, which would be the elimination of waste, definition of value as defined by our clients, continuous improvement.

And when the team knows that they're not just empowered to but expected to focus on those items, they do great things. They know that they have the power to change processes when they don't work. They know that they're expected to be collaborative and reaching out and understanding the viewpoints of our owner, our design partner, our trade partners. And by doing that, we end up with a much more dynamic, healthy team that has proved to be very successful in my experience. I love the three pillars reference.

And now that you guys have a sense of who Greg is and what his role is and how he's implementing lean in his organization, let's hear from Bernita. Let's find out more about her. My name's Bernita Bikeman. I am the Director of Operations for Health at HKS, which is a large architecture firm, many, many sectors, but I primarily live in the health group. I'm leading the efforts firm wide and in our health sector specifically to implement lean both internally in our overall project process and as well as teams.

So involved in team training specifically on projects. If we have a lean or lean IPD project to educate, train, but also we're doing that office wide. We have lean champions throughout the world that we do education sessions with. They come to us with questions. We have a couple of different promotional and educational things that we're doing to get people to talk about it.

But in any office initiative that's firm wide, trying to get the message, not necessarily lean, but the idea of continuous and process improvement in everything that we do and some of the fundamental strategies surrounding lean to get people to feel comfortable with doing those things, even if we're not saying the lean word. And it really kind of extends beyond project roles. You get to the point where you're bringing it into daily life and you start just a different way of thinking that really helps keep your life in order in a way that wasn't possible before understanding some of these basic concepts.

It's great to meet Bernita and find out some of her motivations. Let's go ahead and meet Andrea. I'm Andrea Sponsal, Vice President at HKS. And part of my role at the company is to support our lean champion group. In addition to my background in interior design, part of my role is to help support Bernita in that effort and coach and mentor the other lean champions around the world.

But the reason I enjoy it, or I guess the reason how I got involved in this is just the spirit of lean resonated with me when I first started on my IPD journey and lean journey about seven years ago now, I think. But just that spirit of not doing things that don't matter, eliminating waste and creating value for a project is just something that was really inspiring and so that's why I lead the role I lead. So I heard about HKS initially when Bernita did a presentation at the Boston Congress in 2015.

I heard her actually speak about how to apply lean in everyday life. Yeah, we've actually got a lot of comments about that presentation. And I think sometimes we've brought it into LCI training because sometimes I think it's easier for people to apply it to simple aspects of their life to understand it before they jump into project work because sometimes people are a little bit more protective of their project work, especially if they're really good at their job, they don't want to change that. But if they can change a few things at home or they can change a few things in their immediate office environment or their immediate work environment that start to show improvement and they can get used to the idea and used to the changes and can think about implementing it really everywhere.

And I thought that was great. And so I asked Andrew where her thoughts might be. When we reach out to other offices, it's also kind of easier to train in that manner too, that if we try to have them five S their office or think about what their value stream map is. We've recently done this with a couple of our offices around the world that have moved locations. We had them go through a process of identifying what their current state was and what was good about that, what they wanted to improve.

We had them do waste walks through the office. What are areas that we can really reconfigure how departments work together or how we can reconfigure the amount of storage that we have to create a better work environment. And when we start to apply those internally or with things that are really familiar, then it helps people apply them out on a project. They feel a little more confident about what they're doing because they've had some kind of in-house experience with it. It's a safe place.

If you mess up, it's a little more okay, I guess, than if you're messing up in front of a client. You're just kind of learning and practicing amongst your friends and family. So as I mentioned before, I was really interested in understanding how teams worked. And I wanted to get that understanding about how the lean tools were used in order for the best performance to actually take place. Well, it's something you have to reinforce all the time.

As the team gets pulled together, they need to understand that they're expected to behave in those manners to think in those terms. Having large objectives clearly stated for the whole team to work towards is important in that manner. Developing, whether it's through partnering or other methods, common objectives for the entire team, owner, contractor, designers, trade partners. That tends to get the team focused on where they need to go. And they just need to be continually reminded that they have the power to change things if they don't like the way things are going.

The first thing to remember and to understand for any team member is to have an understanding of what motivates them. And what a lot of time motivates designers is the ability to increase the quality of their work. And one of the things that application of lean and specifically target value delivery used on a lean project is it gets us the ability to have an understanding first of what everyone values, what's the conditions of satisfaction that everyone considers to be excess. And everyone has an equal say in that.

So our construction partners have an equal say. But our design partners have an equal say too in declaring what is the most important thing, what satisfies our customer the most, what design ideas they wanna see implemented in the project. And it creates a strategy to get there. So if there's a certain project element that they really wanna keep that's important to the overall vision of the project, both in terms of customer satisfaction and in terms of just the quality of work that we wanna keep in there, we can tell that story to our construction partners in a way that we never did on a traditional project where all you're turning over is a design.

They're applying constructability and cost to it. And sometimes we get things stripped out that aren't ideal. So I think working in a lean matter with all partners lets us all have really great conversations about what's important and can let us have the opportunity to keep some of the quality and aesthetic things that we wanna keep. So given those results, I really wanted to know what their tools and techniques were. So lean tools and processes are extremely helpful because they're inherently collaborative.

They reinforce those same values. While I give my teams freedom to use the tools that are going to benefit them and to adapt the tools as necessary to their particular needs, gives them a basis and gives them a framework to work with. I think some of the things that are often overlooked aren't necessarily tools like an A3 or choosing by advantages, but that team building part. A lot of times people don't think that we have time for that sort of thing. And I think if we can learn a lesson from the keynote speaker that we just all had is that that part is important.

You have to build the foundation of your team. You have to build the trust. You have to build the commitment around the project in order to implement these tools because if you're just kind of a new person bringing them in, you're less likely to adopt them if you haven't formed that basic understanding of them and of yourselves as a team, what the true goal is that you're working towards. And I would say another thing is the conversations that happen. And a lot of them happen through using last planner design, but the conversations that happen that pinpoint the process of design because I think designers are comfortable with the messiness of design, but I don't think others that haven't been exposed to it are the fact that we start with nothing.

We have some parameters. We apply constraints to that nothing. And we have to create something out of that. And there's a lot of iteration in that and there's a lot of change in that. And there's a lot of, I don't know the answer yet.

And there's a lot of stuff that's captured inside people's heads that we have to learn how to communicate on a job to have an equal understanding between the people designing and the people constructing. And if we get to that point before the job is built, where we have a really strong trust with each other and good team building, and we can have good conversations about what's going on with the design between the design partners and the construction partners. You end up with a better product. You end up with a much smoother construction process.

And we all are really proud of the end product in a completely different way. So let me tell you, when I heard these responses, I was shocked. I thought there would be choosing by advantages or utilizing A3, like a specific tool or technique that was a resounding, you must do this. Guess what? That wasn't it.

It's about trust. It's about team building. Texts and emails are really only as effective as the communication is already. And the relationship is already between the people exchanging the texts and the emails. So if they're not talking to each other, if they're not understanding each other, a lot of the information can get lost.

Focus can be lost. Time can be lost by people not simply speaking to each other in terms. They're very human. Technology can be a blessing and a curse in that. We've certainly seen things such as BIM modeling have advanced the ability for those tools to be used effectively, but we've also seen them as roadblocks to progress, where people say, well, I've got a model, therefore I'm being lean.

We have everything in the model, therefore it's perfect. The model is as good as the information that goes into it and how it's managed and how it's communicated. So technology can certainly help, particularly with communication, but sometimes going back to the very rudimentary tools such as whiteboards and posted printed out metrics of how the team's doing can be even more effective. Now I don't know about you guys, but I thought it was really interesting that there was no specific tool or technique, like tangible tool. I was thinking A3s, choosing by advantages, last planner, something specific I could jump into and say, yes, this is gonna be the thing that makes me successful.

No, that doesn't happen to be the response. Who knew that team building, trust, transparency, being human actually works? So I'm gonna do a quick cover review of the book that was exclusively printed for the 19th annual Lean Construction Institute Congress and was distributed in our goodie bags. The book is called The Pocket Sensei, Mastering Lean Leadership with Forty Katas, Volume One, Hal Mechelmer and Kalei Devi were the authors. The testimony on the back was written by the LCI chairman of the board, Mark Konchar.

It says, this book explores tactics for lean leaders to continue learning and leading by exposing problems, having fun finding waste in our processes and running short-term hackathons or competitions. All are means to spark the creative juices hidden within organizations, teams and individuals. You'll be surprised by what you find. So you can find this book at thepocketsensei.com and that's my cover review. This second segment, we're gonna be talking with both Dan and Derek.

They're both consultants, but I'll let the two of them introduce themselves to you. My name is Dan Fouchet. I'm managing director of the Realignment Group of California and I'm a lean coach. As I kiddingly tell my clients, I'm a chubby lean coach. My name is Derek Brown.

I got involved in the lean community probably about 12 years ago with the manufacturing and logistics side of the business with a company called Lean Core Supply Chain Group. I wanted to learn a little bit more about each of them. So I asked them to share their experience and a little bit about their lean journey. Well, I've been in the business for almost 40 years. My lean experience has been since 2008.

I'm relatively new to the practice but I learned from the pioneers, Greg Howell, Glenn Ballard, Iris Tomalin, Will Lichtig. Will would probably not want to be called a pioneer, but he is. Consequence, I really feel like I've learned it from the people who invented it or who brought it to this industry. And that means a lot. What's really happened since 2009 when I started actually coaching was I learned most from my clients because I know what I can teach them in terms of techniques or tools or culture or how to pull things together or how to conduct a big room or how to facilitate this or that.

What they teach me is that this stuff really works. Over my career there, I've spent time inside of multiple organizations and industries just helping them transform and embrace lean principles. And through that period of time, started teaching for Lean Enterprise Institute, serving in multiple capacities, training and educating organizations and consulting with them to help transform their business. Now, I actually interviewed both Dan and Derek separately, but they had some common topics to discuss. The first thing that they both had some really interesting experiences and or scenarios to talk about was schedule.

For example, and this is going back a few years, John Wayne Airport, Terminal C, Southwest Terminal in Anaheim in Santa Ana Airport. The contractor had five months of work left to do, but they only had three months left to do it. So they had a sophisticated CPM schedule, P6 schedule, the most professional P6 scheduler available. Guy really knew his stuff. And he said, there's five months of work left to do, and we only got three months, what are we gonna do?

I'll have Dan finish that story in a little bit, but I want you to hear what Derek has to say about some schedule problems. As we've worked in a lot of construction sites and watched their embracing of the IPD process and really the embracing of lean principles on the job site, we've recognized a few things. One is that there's a lot of work being done in the construction industry by leading thinkers and cutting edge organizations and the embracing of lean principles on the job site. Yet when it comes time for them to problem solve around delays in their logistics and delays in their supply chain, and really connecting the inbound flow of the material from vendors through fab shops all the way to job site and lining up with their pitch, there's just a, I'd say a lack of overall maturity in supply chain thinking.

Now supply chain is something that we don't typically talk about when it comes to implementing lean, but I thought it was important to talk about when it comes to looking at the big picture. So we'll continue this conversation about some of the challenges that we face in schedule and we'll cover the solutions in a minute. What we've seen out there in the industry is not that individuals don't care about this, but they're not even aware, right? They've been trained for the last 20, 30 years to do their trade very well, to do the work that they're doing very well, and have just accepted these logistics and supply chain constraints as that's the current way of doing business, and they're not even aware that there's opportunity out there to improve.

So one of our divisions, our training education division, will partner with organizations and really teach them and train them to think differently. In a construction process, a well-defined schedule is going to have a pitch, and that pitch is going to say, we're gonna have the electricians and the mechanical contractors through this phase of the operation or this phase of the process on these dates, and then there's gonna be a handoff to the drywall and other elements of the business. And they will manage that pitch schedule very disciplined.

Yet what will happen is during the standup, there will be a conversation where it'll say, well, what we need to install, the mechanical contractors are falling behind in their shop, some of the aluminum is backed up, they're not able to get that delivered on time, and so they're having to rearrange the schedule when that problem could have been known about weeks in advance had they have been looking at it through the lens of a supply chain thinker. And even tactically on the job, you'll have a livery of product, and many of these trades, they're trying to manage the constraints of the crane availability or manage the constraint when the ingress and egresses are open for them.

So they'll flood a job site with material thinking that it's not such a big deal, but it impacts negatively the productivity of the other trades. The solution is we're gonna have extra conversation and kind of manage these conflicts through our IPD process and through our board review meetings, rather than saying, hey, if we had a good solid material flow plan for this job to begin with, we could avoid all this altogether. And then we could align the delivery from vendors all the way through the inbound logistics process to the job site so that it aligns with our pitch.

So remember that stellar scheduler that was on the project that Dan was talking about? Let's hear what happened. So we brought in Last Planner, and they did increase 40% the productivity, and they did five months worth of work in three months. In fact, that productivity increased just by removing waste, by smoothing out the handoffs and creating flow in the work, that made that much difference. We don't even claim that in the lean community, but we experience it.

That's the kind of the hidden advantage, is that we say you'll get more productivity, you'll get better results. Now hearing those benefits gets you jumping pretty much out of your seat trying to figure out what can be done in order to realize that type of success. Now, there is a perspective that lean methods might not be enough, and we'll hear Derek's perspective on that. Retail logistics, it is very common for a pallet of product to come out of their distribution center, and it have a spot on the floor that it's supposed to land so that it minimizes the amount of retail labor in the put away process.

Well that type of thinking is not even really being embraced. Could you imagine a day in which we've got a milk run pulling together multiple vendors products, and we've got junction boxes and wiring along with some of the HVAC equipment, all delivering together to the same location, anticipating installation in 30 minutes or an hour prior to the actual time it's ready to be installed. And if we can envision that day, imagine the labor savings and the ability to improve our on time delivery of the overall job, because our labor is no longer looking for product, they're not stepping over and tripping over other people's materials, they're able to just focus on the build process and the build process alone.

What we're doing is we've worked with a lot of organizations in other industries to solve problems that are currently happening in the construction industry. Through some of the partners that we're working with now, we're seeing that we can easily take those solutions and apply them very quickly to really turn around the overall supply chains for these organizations and ultimately reduce the cost associated with the supply chain problems that are occurring on the job site and enable the organizations to better hit their timelines or even deliver ahead of schedule.

I think that both Derek and Dan would agree that, yes, the earlier you get involved with a project and start looking at ways to eliminate waste, whether it be supply chain or utilizing last planner, choosing by advantages, A3s, whatever the means is, then you're gonna get much better results. So with that being said, what are some of the benefits that we can get from utilizing lean? 42% reduction in change orders. My colleague, Dave Umstott, when he was with San Diego Community College District, took a project, a $1.6 billion capital improvement project, about a third of the way into the execution of that capital improvement project, he brought in lean and got serious with it, really, really drove it down, pulled it down into the organization.

And as a consequence, their experience was 42% reduction in change orders, 45% more of the projects qualified for LEED certification, comparing lean projects to pre-lean projects. So it's pretty dramatic. They saved $900,000 per project cost savings on average over 34 projects. Planning for a long-term gain here really shifts the focus, implementing lean. Deep into organizations should be positioning to you to look for different ways to disrupt the process that you're already improving, essentially thinking outside of the quote unquote box.

So we will teach them about lean principles. We will teach them about lean supply chain principles and how they can embrace those principles at every aspect of the business. And then our consulting division will come alongside of organizations and really assess the current state of their business, not just on an individual project, but even how they're taking the learnings from one project and applying it to another, right? So how do we build a supply chain process that not only improves one project and one build out, but also can be then used in our next project and the next project and have it be repeatable.

And our consulting processes will support organizations to transform. And then our logistics division serves as the control tower. So we will be able to track and trace and design a logistics network so that we can have part visibility from a vendor overseas when that part is actually delivering at the port to when that part is in transit. So if there ever be a situation where we've got schedule changes in the build process, we've got visibility to where this material is in transit and we can make decisions that are educated decisions in real time in advance of this material needed to be on site and minimizing the amount of call activity and firefighting that needs to go on by the site folks.

Because we want the site folks to be focusing on their core competency and really getting the build process underway and executing that quickly with high quality. It seems like Derek's experience has gotten him to a point where he understands that collaboration is not enough and we need to add technology to manage the logistics, especially for extremely large projects. The converse perspective is taking the sometimes hundreds of hours we have in the room and mapping that technology onto it. That really is truly the game. You can't have one without the other.

My clients have taught me that people are smarter than we give them credit for. It's not unusual for us to walk into a trailer on a job site and maybe it's time to kick off last planner for the first time for this group. You gather around all the superintendents and foremen and project engineers and others and we go around the room first time, everybody introduces themselves. My name is John, I'm the plumber and we ask them, how many years do you have in construction? Go around the room, maybe there's 15, 20, 25 people there.

If you add up all the years they have in construction, it's 300, 400 years. And if you think about how much a person could learn in three or 400 years and then look around the room and every one of those people knows something different, they know more than the next person to them about their specific trade or activity and you put that together. I was telling a group earlier today, there are two ways to get a supercomputer. You can go to Cray and pay them a whole lot of money or you can string together a bunch of PCs and put some software on top of it that allows it to use the intelligence and the capacity of all those different PCs and you create out of that a supercomputer.

And that's what we're doing with Lean in Teams on projects, is creating supercomputers because we have such respect for people and they deliver. We started out back in 2005 looking at how Toyota did logistics and how a lot of organizations were trying to embrace Toyota's logistics principles. They didn't have the volume that Toyota had, they didn't have the logistics network that they had, they didn't have the cash or the human capital that Toyota had. And so we developed a process that was supported by a technology system that enables organizations to embrace the principles without having all of the additional cost and labor resources.

And so the way that our technology works is we will pull information from quote processes and forecasts and really be able to design out a logistics network that can then be executed on a daily basis and optimized on a daily basis so that we're managing the total cost of the operation. So not just transportation costs, but understanding the transportation costs, the warehousing costs, the delivery costs. So this material and information flow is to be looked at through our optimizer engine, the optimizer engine will be able to create the static design and then that static design is reviewed on a daily basis by our team of transportation engineers and transportation managers to do daily optimization of the material flow through the entire process.

The brilliant benefits of it is as issues arise, which they always do, have immediate notification that the issue has occurred and it's no longer at the point of when it's due, it's at a point of when the issue occurs, right? So if the supplier didn't ship on time or they shipped their own product, we're getting that notification weeks in advance so that they can do the advance planning and really solve the conflict before the conflict even occurs and impacts the job site. We'll be able to do recovery processes and expedites that keeps logistics costs down, but also helps stabilize the overall network.

And then the software that we've built also gives a part level view to where that material is. So once the supplier submits their ASN, advanced shipping notice, that notification is available in the system. We know at a part level where it is as pickups and deliveries and cross-docs occur, we're able to track that material through the network and have complete visibility. So anytime there's a schedule change or anytime there's an operational malfunction that would cause them to wanna pull up or change or reorder their pitch of the construction process, then adjust the logistics network to deliver that with very little effort.

The whole business case for Lean that Bevan, Mace and others are bringing around the country talks about three times more likely to finish ahead of schedule or under schedule and twice as likely to finish it under budget. But the news is that and better when you actually look at the individual projects and companies. So I liked what Derek had to say about Lean Core and maximizing the benefits of Lean by really looking at the supply chain. In addition to that, Dan talks about the business case for Lean, which if you haven't heard about that yet and the report that the Lean Construction Institute released, check out my episode with John Pemberton.

It's called, Be a Continuous Improvement Junkie with John Pemberton. You can find that at constructor.com slash EP36. Lastly, let's hear a little bit about Dan's new book that's just released. It's called Lean Project Delivery Building Championship Project Teams. And Dave Amstadt and I have been working on this for a couple of years and we kind of like what we got.

I think it's gonna work. It's 15 chapters, it's 250 pages, it's in full color. It gives specific examples, it gives the overview, but it also takes the reader, regardless of the level they are in their Lean journey, it takes them from the beginning of laying the foundation for what the need is and what a really great championship team looks like all the way through to how to build a team and kinds of tools to use when you need certain kinds of things. And then finally, ultimately, how you onboard people and how you bring them in and train them and how you use simulations and all that stuff.

And so there's a lot of value there. I think it's gonna be a benefit to the community. Oh, that's gonna be so great. I'm just really grateful that Dan Fatscher and Dave Amstadt have taken the time out to contribute this book to the community. So this is going to be the last segment of this episode, but it's also gonna be the best.

It is going to be a mashup, a segment where the guests who we've interviewed today in this episode, they're gonna be talking about what future integration looks like, what the future of construction looks like and what the right Lean mindset should be. Advanced notifications and communication, I would say it would be customizable by customer. Approval processes, we can set business rules in place where it would be an exciting next step for us to be able to integrate as designs are being made, able to cut POs right out of those designs and have that flow right through the system.

I would just say, the next time you're out in the field, stop for a second and watch. And if you watch through the eyes of supply chain and material flow, your eyes will be open to another world of waste that you've never even imagined. It's one thing for us to see people standing still. Okay, well, we've got a problem, there's waste here. It's another thing for us to see people arguing about where they're going to run an electric line versus an HVAC because the BIM has it in the same place or the plan's not integrated.

It's another thing to see a group of folks working extremely hard and stepping over each other's materials and searching for materials. One job site I was at, they had a team of folks that were doing nothing but running back and forth and digging through containers, looking for product and looking for materials, didn't have a solid plan. In the current state of our business, that type of activity is just accepted and it's thought to be, well, that's the way we do things. Step back and look, say, okay, is this really adding value?

The more frequently that our consumers and customers come and pressure us to get cost out and be more competitive, right? There's only so much that we can pull out the productive value added activity that people are doing. We've got to look for new places to find waste. And this is an area that I would say is largely untapped in this industry. Well, I think fortunately, lean builds on many elements of our industry that have been most successful always, but it brings very much more tight focus on those key elements, included with the continuous improvement and elimination of waste and value definition, the trust that's needed in order for teams to collaborate successfully.

And as we get into a more and more interdependent economy, the ability of our teams to quickly integrate with our partners makes this more successful. I think that the industry as a whole will continue to experience that integration over time. I think we're seeing a lot of different alternative delivery types. I think we all hope that a traditional design bid build for the most part goes away, because it constrains a lot of people in the overall participants in design and construction. I don't know what the right delivery method is, because I hear arguments all over the place, but I certainly think that our ability to move the industry is directly impacted by our ability to communicate with each other and have an understanding of how important the different roles are.

The design world's changing constantly in terms of what we have to provide, our ability to provide it, the tools and techniques by which we provide things, the constraints that we have, both environmental and with agencies and with some of the constraints owners put on with us, but our construction partners have some of the same constraints. So our ability to continue to work in a way that allows us to communicate with the best interests of the people we're providing the building store. The more progressive we can make that, the more sustainable our own jobs will be.

I hope that in 10 years, people don't see vulnerability as a bad thing, that we sort of break down the barriers that we're starting to chip away at today, that it's okay to say I don't have the answer when I walk into a design meeting. It's okay to get advice from a trade partner and a constructor, because it's not saying that you're stupid, it's not saying you don't know how to do your job. It's just saying I need some help because I know there's a better way.

And my hope is that we can start to have that be more of the norm than the not so normal way that it is, I think, right now. I think it's very important that teams focus on where they're trying to get to. There are all kinds of tools, there are all kinds of resources out there, but to keep the focus on, again, those three main pillars of continuous improvement, elimination of waste, and value definition, because if you do that and you can effectively do that, the rest of the benefit comes along with it.

And we can't stress it enough, of just education, education, education. You know, don't stop learning, don't stop trying new things. It's that spirit of continuous improvement, and I think just embrace it. And you can't ever stop improving yourself and ultimately improving the projects in which you work. I mean, it doesn't ever stop.

It actually makes it pretty exciting, because we'll never get bored. I think it does make it pretty exciting to Bernita. Oh man, this was great. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I want to send a special thanks to all of my guests, Greg, Andrea, Bernita, Dan, and Derek.

All of you were great. Thanks for your contribution to the Lean Communities, LEI, Lean Construction Institute, and wherever else you serve in your organizations. We could not be pushing the industry forward without you guys. So I hope you guys enjoyed this recap. This is recap week number two of the 19th Annual Lean Construction Institute Congress.

And we are going to continue on for two more weeks. We have some really good stuff lined up for you, but if you enjoyed this episode, let me know if you did. Reach out to me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT. Find me on LinkedIn. You can message me there, or you can just email me at britney at constructor.com.

That's B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at constructrr.com. In the future, we have, again, some Lean veterans, Howard Ashcraft and Rex Miller lined up. So don't miss out, but please don't forget to subscribe at constructor.com if you haven't done so. Ready to get email updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at your preferred audio platform.

So please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.