SINS OF THE PAST

Several years ago now I read the book: "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. The book leaves you with that kind of "well......duh" feeling. I do not think there is an industry or grouping of people supposedly dedicated to a common goal that wouldn't benefit from the application of those theories.

The construction industry is definetly one of these groups. The construction industry for the most part is still modeled after old manufacturing practices and even older assembly line task oriented behavior. "It's not my job" is a mantra. The industry itself seems to have a learning disability.

As a whole, the industry has not grabbed the LEAN Principles and put them into action. The industry was quick to grab hold of GREEN but all those efforts did not address a core problem embedded in the industry as a whole. GREEN makes the industry look better, but did not actually make it better.

In the field, there is little Capabilbity Model improvement actions or control processes that would prevent defects from occuring. A defect can be anything. Wrong cuts, poor efficiency, wrong installation, wrong products, unfamiliarity with product storage, installation criteria, material stabilization.......etc. The list is seemingly endless.

I have to interject something my dad told me when I was a kid - it was a joke, but it had underlying LEAN principles that are more easily recognized today. The little joke started out by talking about the guy who was hired to paint the white line down the middle of a long road with a can of paint and one paint brush. On the first day, he painted a half mile, the second day he painted a quarter of a mile and on the third day he only painted a few hundred feet. On the third day his supervisor showed up to inspect his progress and was aghast at the lack of progress. When the supervisor watched the man in action he quickly informed the laborer that he needed to move the paint can along with him.

You might laugh a little about that but I've seen something very close to this on a construction site almost every day. Not too long ago I approached a superintendent on a repair project - who I had already taught to approach the apartment building exterior in crews or teams with each team having a cut man on the ground -and asked him why the cut man was having to walk back and forth to the piles of lumber and later on.....siding. I counted the steps and figured that the contractor's crews were wasting about $2500.00 per day, per building. At the time, there were only two buildings under investigation and the project was on a cost plus basis so the inefficiency was costing my client money. The point? Move the lumber you idiot.

On the same project, a different contractor, installed 6 windows that were visually defective from the manufacturer. During the pre-contract interview with this contractor, when asked about process and quality controls in place at the company, we were informed that the company did have process and quality controls in place. Apparently, they did not.

The windows were bowed outward from the factory. The defective windows were only caught by the owner's representitve on a courtesy punch list walk to inspect joints and nailing patterns on the first floor of the building. The first observation of one bowed window led to discussions about the installation of the window causing the bow or perhaps the original wall assembly was badly bowed. Turned out neither of those was true and the factory representative was brought out and quickly admitted that all of those windows were manufacturing defects.

All of that to say, that the general contractor did not have sufficient process controls to assure that visually defective windows would not be installed.

This story is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousand more just like it. Poor planning, an adherence to outdated methods and means, old technology or none at all, poor or inadequate skills, and an overall failure to adopt and put into practice newer, more "one piece flow" concepts, LEAN models and Six Sigma controls in the industry means were paying more and more and getting less and less.

I strongly believe that Mr. Senge's point about pushing growth or more appropriately, pushing learning and change, is a bad idea. Mr. Senge suggests that removing obstacles to learning, change and growth can cause momumental shifts and changes in the way a group of people, a company or even an industry learn, innovate and change.

The industry is languishing thirty or forty years behind. Time to catch up!! Move the paint can.