2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang
Application of Lean Model to Reduce Waste of Time
in Construction
Case study of concreting task in Malaysia
*Ali Lajevardi, **Intan Rohani Endut and **Soleyman Paydar
*Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
**Malaysia Institute of Transportation (MITRANS), Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
ali.la81@yahoo.com
Abstract This paper is a case study in order to evaluate the
result of implementing the relatively new productivity
management approach lean production in local construction
industry of Malaysia in order to achieve better project outcome.
Delay in project delivery is a major issue of concern for
managers of construction projects. Traditionally the
management tried to put effort to decrease construction task time
by increasing resources to reduce duration of process activities.
However the objective of lean concept is to avoid project delay by
looking to the whole construction tasks rather than what is called
activity based thinking. This research analyzes a case study of
concreting task by initially identifying activities that contribute to
the waste of time and then determining the amount of those
activities.
Keywords: lean construction, time waste, construction
management, value creation, Malaysia construction, project delay
I. INTRODUCTION
Despite many management efforts, construction industry is
facing a lot of issues regarding proper performance and
productivity. Many of the projects fail to deliver the
preliminary objectives especially on-time project delivery. A
contributing factor to this issue is the fact that the construction
process greatly contains activities which do not generate any
value to the final customer. Therefore these activities are
considered as wastes [9]. For example in Australia up to 35%
of project total cost is wasted on reworks [1]. A 1998 research
of UK department of the environment, transport and the
regions (DETR) among UK, Scandinavian countries and US,
also indicates a 30% contribution of reworks and a minimum
contribution of 10% waste of construction materials while
labor efficiency is only 40-60% [2].
Similarly, the construction industry in Malaysia is facing
the same performance problems, especially failure in on-time
project delivery, mostly due to lack of recognition of real client
needs through proper management and a value creation system
[3, 4]. Therefore, the local construction industry needs better
methods of project management to achieve better project
outcome by reducing any activities that does not contribute to a
better final delivery. Time wastage is an important factor
directly affecting on-time delivery of a construction projects.
Therefore there have been studies suggesting and evaluating
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the use of newer project delivery systems and concepts in
construction projects and as a result considerable elimination of
time-related wastage was measured [5] [6].
In this effort, one of the concepts which were introduced to
the construction industry in the recent decades is lean
production system. Since the manufacturing industry has
always been a source of new ideas and concepts for the
construction industry, the lean concept was introduced to
construction industry after being successfully implemented in
manufacturing industry [7]. What was later commonly called
lean construction, was adopted by researchers as a new
approach toward construction project delivery system and
aimed to better fulfill customers needs, while using the
resources at minimum [8]. The objectives of lean construction
are to generate value to the final customer (client) and
eventually to eliminate the factors that do not add any value
and are considered as waste [5]. Waste in construction and
manufacturing industry actually comes from the same old
activity based thinking in which reduction of cost and duration
of each activities is thought to be the optimizing factor.
However lean construction is aimed to improve the
performance at the project level and through the whole project
lifecycle by managing interactions between activities and their
dependency and variation [8].
II. LEAN PRODUCTION SYSTEM
In the 1950s the manufacturing industry was introduced a
new production philosophy by Toyota company in Japan. The
systems were then developed and improved by industrial
engineers in a long process of trial and error and became
widely used in later decades in other industrial countries [9].
Many successful cases were reported from application of that
new production philosophy - which is known by different
names such as lean production or initially Just-In-Time
(JIT) production - in improvement of the productivity of
manufacturing firms [8-10]. Lean production is defined as a
system that can reduce overall cost especially indirect cost
while maintaining quality standards and reducing
manufacturing cycle time [11]. Or a production system that
will deliver a custom product instantly on order but maintain
no intermediate inventories [8].
 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang
The traditional view toward production, which used to be
the basis for understanding production in many disciplines,
defines production process as a process of converting an input
to an output (Fig.1). This conversion process could be divided
into sub-processes or activities with same characteristics. The
value of the output was associated with the cost of the inputs to
that process and the total process cost was minimized by
reducing each sub-processs cost. On the contrary, the lean
production model (Fig.2) is a flow of raw material and/or
information that is processed, inspected, waited or moved to
reach the finished product [9]. These activities are different in
nature as processing is the conversion of material or
information while inspecting, moving and waiting characterize
the flow feature of production.
The lean concept attracted the interest of many scholars in
the construction industry who argue that the lean principles can
be implemented to the construction industry as a service
industry in order to reduce activity performance time and
projects costs. One of the reasons is that a service can be
considered as a product since it is started with a customer
demand (client) and it ends when it is delivered to them in the
desired time, cost and quality through design and development
(construction) process [12].
In a lean system, value refers to the achievement of
customer requirements. Although all activities contribute to the
time and cost of production, only process activities add value to
the final product whether it is material or information.
Therefore, for the improvement of the flow process, focus is
mainly to reduce or eliminate activities that do not add any
value (so-called nonvalue-adding activities) whilst the
process activities or value-adding activities have to be more
efficient [9]. The nonvalue-adding activities are actually
product flows that only tie process - or also known as
conversion - activities together e.g. inspection, rework or
waiting. For example handling, rearrangement and re-moving
of material are nonvalue-adding activities which are more
likely to happen especially in small construction sites [13]. In
order to have a successful lean production system, there are
three foundations that supplement each other and must work
together relatively. Continuous flow of information and level
production is matched with customer demand. However this
continuous flow must exist in an environment of high quality
and standardized operation. For example, if the quality level is
rather poor, then the stable operation will not be achieved
because low quality is prone to rework. On the other hand, high
quality is associated with stable operation which is a result of
combination of labor, machineries, system control compounds
Figure 1. The Traditional View of a Production Process [9]
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stability and standardized work [14].
III. METHOD
This study aims to investigate application of lean model to
reduce waste of time in construction projects of Malaysia.
However the objective of this paper which is a part of a larger
study - is to identify and highlight the significance of time-
related wastes by using the lean model. . For this purpose, the
authors have chosen a case study method because of its ability
to deal with a wide variety of evidence and different data
collection methods. Moreover the case study can be a preferred
method when dealing with how or why research questions that
focus on a contemporary phenomena [15]. However, in order
to conduct a case study, having a developed theory before
collection of any data is a necessity [16-18]. In this case the
well modeled lean production theory is the basic theory which
is tested with the data collected through direct observation in a
construction site. On the other hand, the single case chosen for
this research had all the conditions for testing the theory;
therefore, studying multiple cases is not necessary in such a
situation [15].
The data was collected through five stages of different
construction tasks including four stages of in-site framing and
one stage of concreting. However due to the limitations of this
paper, only the data from the concreting task is analyzed and
presented here. A key factor which affected the boundaries of
this study was the boundary of the selected project itself. At the
time of data collection, on-site activities were mainly casting of
pile caps and ground beams. The choice of this case study was
initially made due to instant availability of the site and project
data to the researchers.
IV. CASE STUDY
The case study compromises the construction of a 1600
square meter three story luxurious residential bungalow with
basement. The contract sum of the project is approximately
seven million Malaysian Ringgits and total construction
duration is 18 months. The construction of the building consists
of various main tasks including piling, earthworks, super
structure, masonry works, Electronic glass roof, M&E, ID, etc.
However, at the time of data collection for this study, the main
task running at the site was construction of Reinforced
Figure 2. Production as a Flow Process. The shaded boxes represent
nonvalue-adding activities, in contrast to value-adding processing
activities[9].
 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang

Concrete (RC) structure elements. All reinforcements of
structural elements were fabricated at site. Likewise, the
traditional method of in-situ fabricated timber formwork
system was employed to accomplish casting of structural
elements. However the method of ready mixed concrete was
used in casting of all structural elements of the building. The
contractor ordered the required amount of concrete on demand
and it was delivered to the site by the concrete supplier with
mixer trucks.
By adopting the lean production model, as illustrated in
Fig. 2, the construction task duration is the sum of process time
plus inspection, move and wait time. Only the process time is
considered as a value-adding activity and the rest do not add
any value to the final product. Therefore the nonvalue-adding
activities should be ideally eliminated or minimized. However,
process time is also prone to different wastes including but not
limited to (1) over-production waste, (2) construction method
waste, (3) waste from product defects, and (4) poor
optimization in carrying out tasks [5]. In order to measure the
share of all different activities, the required sample data of
concreting task was collected through direct observation at site.
Data analyzed in this paper is the result of one day total casting
of 34 m3 concrete volume. This ready mixed concrete was
delivered to the construction site through six concrete mixer
trucks. It should be noted that since the goal in this study is to
evaluate time-related wastage, it is assumed that every
workers productivity is the same level. Thus, the data is not
affected with workers different level of productivity. That
means all workers contribution to produce one meter cube of a
structure element is equal.
The concrete was delivered from trucks to the casting area
by filling a concrete bucket which was hoisted by a mobile
crane. After filling the structural elements with concrete, the
empty bucket was hoisted back to the truck in order to refill.
The detailed hoisting process times were recorded and
presented in Table 2. The table shows the number of hoists for
each truck and the duration of each which is the duration of
filling and hoisting the bucket until it reached the concerting
point. Since the volume of bucket was considerably smaller
than each trucks concrete volume, hoisting activity was done
several times for each batch of concrete.
In order to identify activities that generate value and those
regarded as wasted activities; the concreting task was matched
against the lean production process flow shown in Fig 2. The
breakdown of these value-adding and nonvalue-adding
activities is presented in Table 3. As can be seen in this table
the only value-adding activity in concreting task is actually the
process time which is the time taken from the first hoist of
concrete until the last bucket of concrete for each batch.
However the process time in this concreting technique is also
prone to process waste which can also be considered as a move
time. The move time is actually the concrete hoisting time in
this technique and is referred to as process wait time in this
article. The description column in Table 3 explains how time
durations of value-adding and nonvalue-adding activities can
be determined from the raw data in Table 1 and Table 2. Table
4 shows the result of these duration times for each concrete
batch.
TABLE IV. DETAIL OF HOISTING DURATION TIMES

V. RESEARCH FINDINGS
Batch 1 2 3 4 5 6

Table 1 presents the collected time data of each concrete Hoist

mixer truck in detail. The Data in this table includes the H1 0:01:30 0:01:20 0:01:15 0:01:35 0:02:05 0:01:15
volume of concrete each truck delivered, arrival time to the H2 0:01:20 0:01:35 0:01:40 0:01:15 0:01:55 0:02:15
site, inspection times and finally concreting time. After the
H3 0:01:20 0:01:40 0:01:15 0:01:20 0:02:15 0:02:00
arrival of each truck to the site, inspection was done by Clerk
of Work. Inspection time recorded for concreting refers to the H4 0:01:25 0:01:20 0:01:50 0:01:25 0:02:20 0:01:40
slump test which measures the workability or wetness of the H5 0:01:20 0:01:25 0:01:35 0:01:40 0:02:40 0:02:30
concrete mix. The test was conducted for each individual H6 0:01:30 0:01:15 0:01:45 0:01:50 0:02:35 0:02:15
batches of concrete delivered to the site and casting was only
allowed if the slump was between the required workability H7 0:01:10 0:01:20 0:01:30 0:02:00 0:02:50 0:02:30
ranges. H8 0:01:15 0:01:15 0:01:40 0:02:10 0:03:00 0:01:50
H9 0:01:10 0:01:20 0:01:20 0:01:50 0:02:40 -
TABLE III. TIME RECORD FOR CONCRETING TASK (RAW FORMAT)
H10 0:01:20 0:01:25 0:01:25 0:01:50 0:02:10 -
H11 0:01:15 0:01:15 0:01:25 0:01:45 0:01:50 -
C.O.W C.O.W
Batch Concrete Arrival Concreting Concreting H12 0:01:10 0:01:30 0:01:40 0:01:40 0:02:10 -
inspection inspection
Number Volume Time start time end time
start time end time H13 0:01:25 0:01:25 0:01:35 0:01:55 0:02:20 -
H14 - 0:01:15 0:01:35 0:02:15 0:02:10 -
1 6 9:25 9:55 10:10 10:10 10:36
H15 - - 0:01:45 - 0:02:35 -
2 6 10:52 10:57 11:10 11:10 11:45
H16 - - 0:01:40 - 0:02:40 -
3 7 12:10 12:12 12:25 12:30 13:28 H17 - - 0:01:55 - 0:02:45 -
4 6 13:35 13:40 13:55 14:30 15:07 H18 - - 0:01:30 - 0:02:45 -

5 7 15:35 15:35 15:50 16:10 17:30 H19 - - 0:01:40 - 0:02:40 -

H20 - - 0:01:45 - 0:02:50 -
6 2 18:00 - - 18:03 18:30
H21 - - - - 0:02:30 -

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 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang

Subsequently further analysis is done on the data of Table 4

TABLE III. CATEGORIZATION OF ACTIVITIES BASED ON LEAN
and the result is tabulated in Table 5. In this table total wait PRODUCTION MODEL
time of each batch is calculated by adding all wait times in that
particular batch and the total wait time for the whole task is the
Type of activity Activity Description
sum of all. Absolute process time is resulted from deducting
process wait time from process time. For example for the batch Value-adding Process time Time taken from start of each
No.1 process time is 26 minutes and process wait time which trucks concrete casting (first
is the sum of hoist times in Table 2 is 17 minutes. Therefore hoist) until end of casting
the absolute process time is 9 minutes.
Nonvalue-adding Process wait Move time hidden inside process
Since the volume of concreting is different in each batch, in time time which is calculated from
order to make a comparison between data of different delivery total hoisting durations in Table
batches of concrete, we need to have a standard data. For this 2. This move time is considered
the process waste time since it is
mean all time data are divided by the volume of concreting to happening in the middle of the
achieve a data of the same value. For example in order to process time and is a motion
calculate the standardized times for batch 1, we divide all time waste since concrete should be
data by 6. The results of data standardization are tabulated in hoisted to the place it actually is
Table 6. being used

Fig 3 demonstrates the value-adding and nonvalue-adding Nonvalue-adding Wait time (1) Time taken from finishing each
trucks casting until arrival of
activities based on data presented in Table 6. The data in this next truck on site. However for
figure is arranged in the order of total duration of tasks. The the first concrete mixing truck
data is then reorganized in Fig 4 where total duration of each this time is calculated from start
task is expressed as 100% to assist the comparison between the of site operation hour (9:00 am)
entries. till arrival of first lorry

The findings show that the absolute process time Nonvalue-adding Wait time (2) Waiting time calculated from
(concreting time) for each batch is actually a very small arrival of each lorry until start of
inspection
percentage of total time. This percentage for the batch No. 1 to
No.6 is respectively 9.4%, 23.1%, 25.3%, 12.1%, 19.8%, and Nonvalue-adding Wait time (3) Waiting time taken from end of
18.6%. As can be seen batch 3 is the most efficient comparing inspection until start of concrete
to the rest since 25.3% of the whole task duration is a value- casting
adding activity. However the rest of the time spent on each task
Nonvalue-adding Inspection time Time taken to perform concrete
does consist of different nonvalue-adding activities which slump test at site
contributes to project delay.

TABLE IV. BREAKDOWN CALCULATION OF DURATION OF EACH ACTIVITY (HOURS:MINUTES)

Batch Number Wait time 1 Wait time 2 Inspection time Wait time 3 Process time Process wait Activity
time duration

1 0:25 0:30 0:15 0:00 0:26 0:17 1:11

2 0:16 0:05 0:13 0:00 0:35 0:19 0:53

3 0:25 0:02 0:13 0:05 0:58 0:32 1:18

4 0:07 0:05 0:15 0:35 0:37 0:25 1:32

5 0:28 0:00 0:15 0:20 1:20 0:52 1:55

6 0:30 0:00 0:00 0:03 0:27 0:16 0:30

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 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang

TABLE V. TIME CALCULATION FOR TOTAL VALUE-ADDING AND NON VALUE-ADDING ACTIVITIES (HOURS:MINUTES)

Batch Total process time Absolute Total wait time Total process wait Total inspection time Total activity
process time time duration
1 0:26 0:09 1:12 0:17 0:15 1:11

2 0:35 0:16 0:40 0:19 0:13 0:53

3 0:58 0:26 1:04 0:32 0:13 1:18

4 0:37 0:12 1:12 0:25 0:15 1:32

5 1:20 0:28 1:40 0:52 0:15 1:55

6 0:27 0:11 0:49 0:16 0:00 0:30

Total Sum 4:23 1:42 6:37 2:41 1:11 7:19

Total non-process wait time for batch 1 to 6 is 57.3%,
30.1%, 31.1%, 47.5%, 32.8% and 54.3% respectively.
Inspection time for batch one to five contribute to 15.6%,
18.9%, 12.7%, 15.2% and 10.6% of total task time respectively
while it does not appear in batch number six. Finally the
process wait time (or move time), which is hoisting time of
concrete, for batches one to six hits 17.7%, 27.9%, 30.9%,
25.2%, 36.8% and 27.1% of total task duration respectively.
VI. CONCLUSION
Although in many countries the concept of lean
construction has been in practice for almost two decades,
previous surveys reveals that the majority of construction
practices in Malaysia are still managed by the traditional
activity-based thinking [19]. Project team usually tries to avoid
any delays by reducing process time of different tasks.
However the findings of this paper reveal that in fact the
process time is not a large portion of the total task time. As it is
shown in the last chapter, absolute process time, which is the
only value-adding activity in a lean system, only takes up to
25.3% of the whole task duration at most. That means the rest
of the time spent on the task is all wasted time rising from the
activities that do not create any value to the final project
delivery. Therefore the management should put all the effort to
employ methods that minimize these nonvalue-adding
activities.
The result of the study shows that the most significant
nonvalue-adding activity in concreting task is waiting time
which ranges from 30% to 57% of the whole task duration.
Educating management team in lean methods of purchasing
and delivery such as JIT purchasing can actually reduce the
task duration almost to half without doubling up the resources.
Likewise, inspection time which takes up to almost 19% of the
task duration can be totally eliminated through a better
relationship among the supply chain. For example, if the
quality of the supplied concrete mix is controlled and the

TABLE VI. . STANDARDIZED TIME CALCULATION FOR TOTAL VALUE-ADDING AND NON VALUE-ADDING ACTIVITIES

Total process Absolute process Total wait time Total process wait Total inspection Total activity
Batch Volume ( m3)
time per m3 time per m3 per m3 time per m3 time per m3 duration per m3
1 6 0:04:20 0:01:30 0:12:00 0:02:50 0:02:30 0:11:50

2 6 0:05:52 0:0:40 0:06:40 0:03:10 0:02:10 0:08:50

3 7 0:08:17 0:03.43 0:09:09 0:04:35 0:1:52 0:11:09

4 6 0:06:10 0:02:00 0:12:00 0:04:10 0:2:30 0:15:20

5 7 0:11:26 0:04:00 0:14:17 0:07:26 0:02.09 0:16:26

6 2 0:13:30 0:05:30 0:24:30 0:08:00 0:00:00 0:15:00

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 2011 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering Research (CHUSER 2011), Dec 5-6 2011, Penang
Figure 3. Absolute time of task cycle for concreting (per meter cube)
required inspections are done before it reaches the site, there is
no need for further inspection at site. Of course, that is only
achievable if there is a high level of trust between project
consultant team and the suppliers. Hence further studies are
highly recommended in order to investigate ways of building
such trust through the project supply chain.
While this study is one of the few studies in lean
construction in Malaysia, it is still limited to certain extent.
This study only covers concreting task in a Bungalow
construction project. The authors believe that analyzing the
concreting task as a sample is important since the majority of
building projects in Malaysia are RC structured (mostly due to
the market price). However, future studies on other
construction tasks and other types of projects are recommended
to identify causes of delay. On the other hand, although in case
of the current paper it does not really matter what type of
project (in term of scale) is chosen, it can be argued that the
choice of Bungalow is not suitable due to the concreting
technique. Usually in larger project especially high rise
construction - the concreting is done by using a pump rather
than hoisting a concrete bucket. That naturally eliminates the
process waste time caused by construction method which was
determined between 17.7% and 36.8% of task duration earlier.
Figure4. Relative time of task cycle for concreting
350
However, employing such technique for smaller projects is not
cost wise in Malaysia. The rental price of a concrete pump is
considerably more than renting a crane. Same argument can be
done over using a larger concrete bucket in order to reduce
process waste time. Nevertheless, hoisting a larger bucket
requires using a larger crane. Unfortunately, according to the
project team of the case study, the price difference between the
two crane sizes does not worth the time saved from employing
a larger crane. Overcoming the process waste time can be
possible by conducting surveys among the contractors to
investigate the practicality of different casting methods. It is
also suggested that future studies compare the process time of
different cases that exercise different casting methods in order
to suggest the most efficient technique which create more value
to the final project delivery.
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