Construction as a Temporary Production System

This course is for the people who plan and run the work on a construction site: site managers, planners, engineers, foremen and subcontractor supervisors on building, Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) and oil and gas projects. It teaches Lean Construction and its best-known planning method, the Last Planner System (LPS), at a practical level. You will learn to run a pull planning session, keep a constraint log, make work ready, write sound weekly commitments, measure Percent Plan Complete (PPC), plan in takt zones, and introduce the method on a real project.

It is a course of study, not a qualification. It awards no belt, licence or certification. No single body owns Lean Construction, and you do not need a certificate to use the Last Planner System on your project.

A factory that is built, used and taken down

Lean thinking started in manufacturing. The Toyota Production System is its best-known source, and the basics of value, flow, pull and waste are taught in the Lean Fundamentals course. Construction borrows these ideas, but it cannot copy the factory directly.

A factory is a permanent production system. The building, the machines and the team stay in place, and the product moves through them. A construction project is a temporary production system. The "factory" is set up on a new site for each project, the product stays still while the crews move through it, and the system is taken apart when the work ends. The team is also new each time: an owner, a main contractor and many subcontractors who may never have worked together before.

How the course is built

The course follows the levels of the Last Planner System from the top down. After this orientation module, you will meet the method's origin and its structure, then phase (pull) planning, lookahead planning and making work ready, weekly work planning with PPC, and takt planning with location-based scheduling. The last two modules cover the Lean site (prefabrication, 5S, safety) and the Lean project (collaborative contracts, target value design, Building Information Modelling, and how to introduce LPS).

The course does not teach general scheduling and the critical path method; that is in the Project Planning and Scheduling course. It does not teach construction safety rules; see the OSHA Construction Safety Awareness (29 CFR 1926) course.