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.
