Learn and Adopt LEAN

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.

Today, I want to talk about what probably all of you out there are facing, which is obviously supply lows and higher prices.
And gosh, construction just seems to get more and more challenging, and I'm sure you're feeling that. So, thinking about
answers, lean construction's been a buzzword around now for quite a few years. And as we're here today and you think
about particularly the supply chain woes and issues, there really has never been a better time to learn lean, adopt lean,
put it into practice. All right? So, I really want to encourage you for that.

If you want to get into it, this book, The Lean Builder, highly recommend this to each of you. Get a copy of it, get all of
your superintendents a copy of it. Whether you go all in on lean and you're a big believer or not, that book will help your
folks. It's a very easy book to read, very folksy, tells the story of a superintendent and a project manager sort of learning
lean on the fly on a job site, and a very good book.

But back to my point, my point here is that the principles and practices of lean are really what you need today to make
sure that you can manage the supply chain challenges and difficulties that we have today. The whole idea behind pull
planning is to be able to look at these things long into the future and make sure that the things you need for construction
are lined up in the proper order to get things done efficiently. And with the supply chain woes we have today, a lot of
these things have moved around, and you have to be very creative to get a plan, to make it all come together and work
together.

Some of the other principles and practices, daily huddles, because things change so much. Yes, we were expecting
something to be delivered this week, but then we found out there is a shortage of trucks and couldn't get it to the job site.
Lo and behold, we got to move and change. So, those daily huddles and the visual communication tools that come with
lean are very effective in reaction, last minute changes, getting the whole rest of the schedule back in alignment with
those changes, all of that works well. Managing constraints, the constraints log, another huge tool in the lean system. And
you can see very well that there are a lot of constraints today, and we have to manage those very actively and very
effectively, and we have to know what they are. And again, we have to plan for them and around them, so the lean system
helps with that.

And then, just finally eliminating waste and having high productivity on your job sites. Interestingly enough, construction,
commercial and institutional construction has stayed pretty much flat through the COVID period, between two years ago
to last year. And this year, we're basically looking at flat in construction, however, employment in construction,
commercial and institutional is down about 5.5% yet, and we have not recovered the employees. Well, what does that
mean? That means we have to be more productive with the employees we have. We have to get more out of everybody's
time and day. And again, having a great system, eliminating the waste, having high productivity and using the lean system
is one methodology to get there.

So obviously, AGC offers a great lean program. That's something that you can take online, in-person, read the book I told
you, The Lean Builder. Get started today. Never been a better time to learn lean and implement lean.

Again, Dennis Engelbrecht. Thanks for tuning in.