As a result of a recent initiative by the UK Government, practitioners and researchers have been considering the development of lean thinking for construction from a strategic viewpoint. This has resulted in the recognition of a construction business system incorporating long term processes of partnering the supply chain, product development, production of components and project implementation....

The concept of “lean” has roots in mass production, originally in the automotive industry, and most famously, at Toyota, where Ford Motor’s original Rouge manufacturing complex was used as its benchmark. Toyota’s managers studied the text of Today and Tomorrow, a book written during 1926 by Henry Ford. Ford conceived the idea of a moving assembly line, after observing the meat packing plants in...

Lean management principles were first developed in the 1950s in the industrial setting of car manufacturing, and the first laboratory was the Toyota manufacturing plant. Further, Womack and Jones are credited in developing the field [1]. Over the past half a century, lean thinking has become more widely embraced, particularly in manufacturing and industrial settings. More recently, it has been ...

This paper describes an investigation into alternative management models applied to public call centres operations with the aim of delivering significant added value to the overall public firm. Call centres offer significant potential for value creation. However, in practice they are often created as mechanistic organisations and managed in such a way is to inhibit value creation. An investigat...

Applicability of lean principles to construction might seem to require that construction’s differentiating characteristics be softened or explained away. This is the strategy employed by those who advocate making construction more like the manufacturing from which lean thinking originated. Following that line of thought, successive waves of implementation would leave ever smaller remainders tha...

Lean principles have been effective in reducing waste in manufacturing organizations. These principles are now being applied in software development processes. This paper describes lean thinking concepts and the process of applying lean in the technical coding at IMVU a virtual worlds company. It also summarizes lessons learned in the implementation of lean for software development processes.

Teaching multifaceted concepts such as Lean philosophy to students/employees that have never had any contact with it may be a quite challenging task. The challenge, when teaching students, is to create a context so that they can imagine and understand why Lean philosophy is important and how it can work. On the other hand, when teaching employees/practitioners, the challenge is to translate the...