Since the early 1990s, scholars analyse possibilities for the Lean production principles to be translated into the construction industry. The implementation of such production philosophy to a different industry as conservative and complex makes it a bigger challenge which was studied for decades by some scholars. In order to grasp a correct understanding of the philosophy, extensive study is carried out on the original philosophy as well as changes to the philosophy in order to translate it to the construction industry. Such changes were unavoidable in order to correspond to the very specificity of the construction industry while the soul of the philosophy was kept intact.
This study provides a set of tools from the Lean construction philosophy that can be implemented in order to reach performances achieved and repeated within the manufactory industry. These tools are defined with their main components, goals and their area of influence. The implementation of new processes is defined and the different stages to follow are assessed. The influence of the phase of implementation is discussed as well as the potential implementation barriers to expect.
Finally a case study on an on going tower project is used as a real life experiment of these tools and their implementation. An assessment of the processes used on the project is run as well as an identification of the potential improvements to work on. The results obtained from this implementation, at an early stage as well as at a later stage are discussed. The results are compared with the expected performances displayed by the theory and analyses on these results are carried out in order to understand them.
Conclusions are drawn as to the variability of results that can be obtain from Lean construction tools implementation depending on the project phase implementation but also on the cooperation of the different actors and the very parameters of the project in which these tools are implemented.