Lean Principle - Kaizen - Managing Every Detail

As contractors look at improving their field productivity or any other aspect of their operations it is important to look at every little detail for improvements.

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Field Productivity: Lean Principle. Kaizen (Every Detail Matters)

This is called many things and regardless of the naming it has produced great results over time:

  • Kaizen - part of the lean terminology and something that Paul Akers demonstrates very well with his team in this short video.  
  • Aggregation of marginal gains is used by many sports teams from Olympic bicycle racing to the All Blacks rugby team.  This essentially means taking everything apart and identify even the most marginal gain - for example making the bicycle chain 1% more efficient.  

In the book Freakonomics they talk about Takeru Kobayashi who rigorously trained for one year before his very first competitive eating contest where he DOUBLED the existing record.  He video taped all of his training sessions and kept a detailed log of improvements providing a great example of PDCA.  For comparison Usain Bolt only improved on the record by 1.6%.


What details of your installations could be marginally improved?  

Finding just 8 seconds of improvements per day will yield a huge return. 


Labor Productivity
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Labor Productivity
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

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