REBAR Production at Heathrow Expansion Demonstrates Power of Lean Construction

by Hal on July 25, 2006

in IGLC, systems

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Application of Pull and CONWIP in Construction Production Systems

Roberto Arbula (Presented by Glenn Ballard)

"The intent to manage construction projects with detailed schedules long into the future is destined to fail."

Push, pull, and CONWIP1 were described. The concepts were explained using the REBAR Production System for Heathrow Terminal 5 Expansion.

  • Operating from a central mind to distributed specialists will be very wasteful.
  • High variation and uncertainty makes long term detailed schedules useless for managing work.
  • Installers worked with detailers to design the production system.

PPC improved dramatically over the life of the REBAR detailing and production.

The story of lean construction at Heathrow is incredible. The project is way ahead of schedule and saving $ millions.


  1. CONWIP stands for Constant Work in Process to produce continuous flow. [ ⇑ back ]

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Note: This post is over 3 years old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information relevant to your comment.

Spam Protection by WP-SpamFree

Previous post: IGLC-14 Underway

Next post: Combining Lean and Agile in Construction