Sure. There are many applications. We're looking at building quality and the use of mistake-proofing or poka-yoke, and trying to prevent mistakes from happening, and trying to prevent quality problems from occurring, also in terms of trying to provide more safe operations. At Berkley, we also have research going on in using the concept of takt time in the delivery of projects. We have worked on small healthcare projects on the order of four or five million dollar projects and worked with integrated project teams to help streamline clear construction schedules with takt time in mind so that the transitions from one work area to another area can be much more smooth than they are in traditional project [inaudible]. Yes. The traditional way of managing projects is to look at tasks and to manage tasks. In Lean, we are focusing on flows of information and materials. We want those flows to be smooth and swift. Much effort in Lean project management is directed in getting these kind of flows, but there's much more. Just recently, we have been looking at the need to use rhetorical principles in Lean implementation. One of key concepts in rhetoric is the idea of common ground, which is necessary for communication and persuasion. Indeed, in advanced Lean construction implementations, we see much effort towards creating common ground in the form of collocation, meetings, and visual management. Well, what we've learned at DPR is that we have to help people understand what those Lean principles are, what Lean thinking is. So we started with a tools-based approach, focused on the last planner, and teaching people that as a big tool. But we've learned that although we've been able to apply very successfully and occasionally on projects, what we need to do is step back and teach them the principles themselves, we need to introduce the idea that our mission is to produce as much value as we can for our customers. Number 1, just focus on value, which is not difficult for people to believe and accept. Then, we have to plan our work based around how best to produce that value. So the focus on quality, I think it enables us to deal with the value question as constructors better. Our people live in the real physical world, we like to build things. So talking in abstractions, as many designers are good at learn to do, doesn't work for us. But when we talk about a quality product: what makes a quality window wall system, what makes quality concrete, what's a quality finish on the interior of the building, helps us that way. So the focus is on value. Once we are clear on value, then we think it's easier for us to look at the waste in the process. Obviously, the value-stream mapping, which follows that logically from this focus on value, practices like that help us then expose waste. But I think the waste comes easier once we have spent the time on value. Look, I've come across a lot of interesting examples, I guess. An interesting one for me was, I heard a paper where some people, who worked with Toyota, so they were Lean experts from a car manufacturer, they were doing work with a bank. The bank, one of the jobs they asked them to look at was the loans office. The loans office in a bank is very difficult to manage in a sense because all the processes are very opaque. So the request for loans come in, they vary in complexity. There's a team of assessors in the office, they vary in skill. There are piles of paper everywhere, and no one really knows what's happening. The way the Toyota guys described what they did was that they looked at the process, and problem of the managers was that just because someone had a large pile of waiting project on their desks, it didn't mean that they were not good at it. It might actually mean that they were very good at it, and so they got all the really complicated ones. So they introduced a visual management system where for every person in the office, they got a wall and they put up a set of transparent plastic folders, holders, to take the files. So they had an in-box at the top and an out-box at the bottom, and two in the middle which were waiting for information. They could see at a glance what the workflow was for every person just by looking at the wall. Then, they could go and interrogate and say, "Well, why do you have so many folders in those intermediate folders waiting for information?" Then, that person could say, "Well, because they're really complicated loans, and I'm waiting for further information, or approval, or whatever." So just by using that Lean thinking of visual management, they're able to take the loan office of the bank and make it much more transparent, and they make it easier for the manager to manage, to see what was going on and say, "Well, this person needs more training because they've got a big pile because they're struggling. This person here, well, we're giving him all the difficult ones. Why are we doing that? Let's share [inaudible]. So just transform something from another industry completely just with the basic principles of Lean. [inaudible] We can see that the use of some of these ideas, and especially, clearly, I think, in the construction of high-rise buildings. High-rise buildings are usually office buildings or residential buildings. They can be anything from 9-10 stories and upwards. What characterizes them is both, at the same time, a great deal of repetition because we repeat the same floors going up, and up, and up, but right at the same time, a great deal of variation because people in offices or people buying apartments, each want their own space to be designed in a particular way. Because there are so much variety in the finishing works in the interior systems, then it means that we cannot relate to the spaces in a tall building all as the same. They're all different, and yet they still belong to this high-rise building. So when we look at flow, we can look first at the structure. So we've worked with a company in Israel who are building many, many high-rise buildings for residences. The cycle time for them to build a single floor is very critical. It determines if you have a construction project of, say, 20 buildings and each building has 20 floors, if you add that up, it's 400 floors. So if you're able to reduce by 10 percent or 20 percent, the duration of that time, you can reduce by many, many months the duration of a project. So examining very closely using building modeling, using simulations, how the cycle time for that floor runs, how much time workers are waiting for the tower crane, how much time the tower crane is waiting for formwork to be prepared, how much time is spent on the ground preparing formwork, and so forth. You can get those cycle times reduced, you can have a very big impact. The basic idea is to find those times in those cycles that are waiting or wasted in any other way and remove them from the process slowly. When it comes to finishing works, we have to take a different tactic because there, we're not dealing with fixed products, and each one has variation. What we have found to be very effective there is that instead of continuing the regular flow of something moving up the building floor by floor, when we do that, we run into problems of design information not being ready. The sequence of information is not consistent because people make decisions at different points in time. So we can re-sequence the flow of work to match the flow of information from the designers instead of the simple geographic flow vertically up the building, and then, we get much less rework. Rework, in the sense, I'm talking about things like, we do some interior work in an apartment and we found out later that the buyer or the purchaser, the owner of that apartment only made the decision about the flooring tiles sometime later, and then, those have to be taken off and replaced. If we sequence that work correctly and wait for it until the information is ready, and instead go into other spaces where the information is already available, then we can reduce a great amount of rework and duration of the project.
