Lean Construction (LC), a management philosophy, is known in the industry to enable organisations to achieve major improvement in terms of productivity and levels of innovation through more collaborative approaches. However, implementing LC is not an easy task for organisations and often requires fundamental changes at both – the strategic and operational level. As more and more organizations undergo their own lean transformation, two questions are often raised: 1) how advanced is our lean implementation? 2) Which lean processes should we focus on based on our lean maturity?
Organizations that have implemented Lean can fall along a wide spectrum of the Lean Maturity Model. At each stage of their Lean journey, they will face different challenges, have different opportunities, and should use different approaches to improve their Lean processes.
The Lean Construction Maturity Model (LCMM) was developed to address this exact problem. The Maturity Models offers an assessment that organisations can measure the gap between their current state of maturity and where they want to be. It consists of 6 factors, 11 key attributes, 60 behaviour practices, and 75 ideal statements. The LCMM provides organisations with crucial information of their current position in the maturation process.
Figure 1: Structure of the model
LCMM defines five maturity levels: 1) uncertain (unaware), 2) awaken (awareness), 3) systematic (siloed implementation), 4) integrated (holistic implementation), and 5) challenging (pushing the boundary). The LCMM provides businesses a tool to plan and direct organisations with support and guidance in their LC Maturation Process.
Figure 2: Five Phases of Lean Maturity
It was developed to be used within organisations such as: clients, designers, contractors, sub-contractors, and others in the supply chain; and maybe long-term projects that are implementing LC.
