Improving the construction procurement process by applying lean techniques

Abstract

In construction industry budget mismanagement is one of major issues for contractors. This causes them the profit lose from the overbudget. Construction procurement is one the major process flaws that can be managed and improved significantly.Lean procurement is a management technique to improve the procurement processes by identifying wastes and remove those.Then the procurement processes are able to be shorten making the whole tasks faster and cheaper. In this research, a procurement process from a residential contractor is used, wastes identified, analyzed, and improved. The methodology compose of three steps which are (1) creating procurement value stream map showing the existing process flowchart to identify steps and wastes; (2)applying lean techniques to reduce wastes and redundant tasks with new processed provided; and (3) adopting to the real tasks validating by the company. The result shows that 12 sub-processes are removed. The waiting time which is the major wastes in the procurement processes were significantly decrease about 75.5 hours from the original time of 242.5 hours which is 68.7% decreased