Lean Consulting

IKERD has provided LEAN consulting to some of the largest publicly traded companies in the building industry in the US as well as internationally. Our success in LEAN consulting is founded upon combining common sense approaches with new technology to address the challenges of sociology and waste in construction. 

The core of LEAN principles fundamentally began in this country with Henry Ford’s assembly process. After Ford’s initial advancement, it was not until World War II when we saw the next major improvements. Jim Womack and Dan Jones defined five principles generalized from their study of Japanese automobile factories who had implemented Edward Deming’s processes from his work in that country. 

Those principles are: 

  • Define value from the customer’s perspective and in their language. 
  • Organize just those work steps necessary to produce the customer value as a ‘value stream’. 
  • Make the work flow as smooth as possible (uninterrupted) along the value stream. 
  • Do the work “at the pull” of the “customer” rather than trying to push the demand. 
  • Pursue perfection by making today better than yesterday. 

These principles apply equally as well to construction-based projects as they do to process-based companies, and they form the basis of IKERD’s approach to LEAN Consulting. The primary difference is that work on construction-based projects is usually performed by temporary organizations doing one-of-a-kind production. This is why IKERD Consulting begins with understanding an organization’s project goals, schedule, and budget.