Contribution of Lean Techniques to Industrialized Construction Adoption: A Barriers Mitigation Approach

Abstract

Despite the benefits associated with industrialized construction (IC), it has low overall levels of adoption. IC is an innovation that is not aligned with institutionalized project supply chains; it has implications in process integration that intensify adoption barriers. Several studies have shown the effectiveness of implementing Lean techniques in different stages of the IC process. This paper exposes the analysis of the contribution of implementing Lean techniques to performance, process flow, knowledge management, and value addition. The implementation results are analyzed in terms of their contribution to mitigating the IC adoption barriers identified in the Chilean context. A systematic literature review is carried out to identify the Lean techniques implemented in some of the phases of the IC process. The analysis of the results reported and the contribution of the implementation of Lean techniques to the mitigation of the impacts of some of the existing barriers to the adoption of IC is conducted using thematic content analysis. Thirty Lean techniques are identified whose implementation results are related to the mitigation of conditions associated with 76.5% of the IC adoption barriers considered to be of high and very high impact for the Chilean context.