A Review on Lean Construction for Construction Project Management

Abstract

The construction industry is an important part of the economic sector of a country, therefore, it is important to verify the new management systems that are implemented in the main construction industries of the world. This article makes a bibliographic review of the Lean Construction (LC) philosophy, introduced by Professor Lauri Koskela in 1992, based on the model used by the automobile industry in the 1980s, called “Lean production”. The theoretical bases of LC intend to see production in construction as a process of transformation, flow and value generator, consequently, the objective of Lean Construction is to create good production systems that allow optimizing, reducing, or eliminating flows to improve delivery times. Within the framework of creating Lean tools to improve the management of construction projects, the Last Planner System arises to improve the work scheduling process and the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) model, which by unifying it with LC becomes the Lean Project Delivery System (LPDS) project execution system, which proposes the methodology to develop construction projects under five phases and 12 “Lean” stages, in which the development of tools that contribute to the generation of value. Finally, the 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) modeling technology, although not part of LC, is an important help tool for the LPDS model, helping to better understand the construction processes of complex designs to save time in their construction. Under this paradigm, the emergence of new tools gives us a better vision of the future of Lean Construction.