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FEATURE


KEEP IT LEAN


Stephen Greenhalgh, lean practitioner expert at Highways England, explains why taking a ‘lean’ approach can make your business fitter and more efficient.


Being leaner also means being healthier, and the fitter we are the more efficient we are. What is good for you is also good for your business. A ‘Lean’ business is fitter and more efficient but what is ‘Lean’?


For Highways England, Lean is doing the right thing in the right way. It is a systematic approach to reducing waste in all our processes, including those in our supply chain, and we are using this across our business. Safety is our top priority, both for our road workers and staff, as well as the four million drivers that use our roads every day.


Lean originated in the Japanese manufacturing industry almost 50 years ago. It arrived in the UK highway industry after proven success in the aerospace and building sectors. The single most important aspect of Lean is that it engages all the people involved in the processes to drive out waste and improve value. At Highways England, Lean is embraced by all parts of the organisation from the traffic officers on the front-line through to the chairman overseeing the operation of the business.


USING LEAN TO IMPROVE HEALTH & SAFETY – THREE CRUCIAL OUTCOMES


Delivering Performance


and Efficiency Lean within the construction industry frees up time to construct more with the same resource, not more with less resource. Lean is about working


www.tomorrowshs.com


smarter not harder and this has clear implications for safety.


When we construct or maintain something in less time we reduce our exposure to risks in what is a dynamic and potentially dangerous environment. Lean helps us produce a better construction product; better quality means less downtime, less maintenance, which again reduces the exposure of our workforce to risks such as fast moving traffic.


Managing Risk


and Uncertainty Highways England uses collaborative planning at a project and programme level. We get together with every element of our supply chain to build the programme, utilising their skills and experience to produce a programme to which all parties agree, with safety at the heart of the plan. It’s not the planner’s programme; the whole team take ownership of it.


The experience of the attendees allows risks and opportunities to be identified, clashes of activities or space constraints can be discussed, and appropriate plans put in place to ensure that risks are managed and delivery is not compromised. This means that we can address any potential safety issues from the outset of a scheme.


Collaborative Planning improves the reliability of our delivery, it provides us with a stable programme, and once we have stability we can remove waste from our processes. We can


assign resources to tasks, being more confident that we get the right people, with the right materials and equipment, to the right place at the right time. Collaborative Planning provides us with more certainty and by reducing variation, creates a safer, more stable place to work. It provides the opportunity for a multi- disciplinary team to collaborate, share knowledge, rationalise and reduce the duration of the programme.


Collaborative Relationships Highways England works with the supply chain to build Lean capability; we provide specialist support to our construction and maintenance suppliers to help enhance capability in areas such as Collaborative Planning and process improvement techniques.


We provide Lean training to our supply chain partners in the knowledge that we will benefit from the returns as a client. We have an established Lean Practitioners community which helps share best practice and coordinates the many initiatives that are developed by our suppliers. This is supported by an online knowledge library which documents successful improvement ideas that can be adopted by other supply chain members.


In this way we can standardise work and reduce variability, leading to an improved final product, which is safer to construct and maintain.


www.highways.gov.uk/highway-england


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