Lean Construction/Integrated Project Delivery

Lean Construction Principles (adapted from the Toyota manufacturing method) aim to provide the most value from the customer’s perspective, while consuming the fewest resources and utilizing the talents of the people who do the work. In the construction industry, this is achieved using specific tools, such as:

• Reverse Phase Scheduling
• Six-week Look-ahead Schedules
• Weekly Work Plans
• Percent Plan Complete Analyses
• "Mission" Meetings
• Multi-trade Solutions Teams

Since Lean Construction Principles were introduced to the Cincinnati construction market several years ago, Grote Enterprises has strived to increase our capacity to support our Construction Manager partners in their utilization of this dynamic project management system. As our overall knowledge of Lean concepts and philosophies has grown, our enthusiasm to not only participate, but to actively encourage its usage on our projects has increased as well.

Similarly, our introduction to and subsequent research and education into the Integrated Project Delivery process has brought our organization to the collective understanding that IPD is not merely the newest construction management trend, but, in fact, the culmination of our industry’s move, over the last several decades, away from the inherently adversarial, and therefore wasteful, design-bid-build (plan and spec) process, and toward a mutually-beneficial, collaborative, and therefore more effective, approach to construction design and performance.

Both Lean and Building Information Modeling, an industry advance that Grote Enterprises has embraced for the last 4 years, are vital components of the Integrated Project Delivery system.