Exploring Characteristic of Visual Management as Lean Toolbox in Construction Worksite of Apartment House

Abstract

At present, the construction industry is actively using lean production, which was born in the manufacturing industry, in order to improve the level of management and reduce wastes. This paper examines the implementation of visual management based on lean production in a construction site in Japan, and analyzes the use of visualization tools. It aims to solve two main problems: first, which visualization tools of lean production are used in Japanese construction industry? The second is that the author wants to clarify which practical problems these tools are used to solve, whether there is a one-to-one correspondence between the tools and the problem, or there is a phenomenon of overlapped purposes between them. To solve the above problems, the author makes a basic collection of the tools currently used in the construction industry by using methods such as on-site observation of the construction site in Japan, interviews with the managers and workers, and so on. Then he carries on word extraction and system diagram classification to the collected tools, which illustrates that the current visualization tools are used for five basic purposes, and at the same time clarifies the phenomenon that these tools do have overlapped purposes phenomenon. Last but not least, the author also analyzes these tools by using the co-occurrence network, and shows the details of the overlapped purpose phenomenon. These findings help to better understand the characteristics of construction site visual management tools from the perspective of the application of lean technology, laying a foundation for better utilization in the future.