Poor materials logistics costs the construction industry more than $2 billion dollars every year. Too often, logistics in the construction industry revolve around on-site handling which is usually too little to impact on the total cost of completing projects.

According to Liker, a famous philosopher, waste is defined as the opposite of value where value is any process that a customer is willing to pay for. Waste is also used in reference to resources that add negligible or no value to the final product. Waste is therefore loss of resources including time, materials, equipment, labor and capital, when these resources are produced by activities that contribute to the final cost but do not add value to the final product.

In the construction industry, after the design is agreed upon, most of the value adding usually occurs at the site. Activities that add value are assembly, packaging and finishing. Other activities such as moving, counting, storing, scheduling and sorting can therefore be said to be wasteful.

Unfortunately, research blames the supply chain for most of the wastes in the construction industry. One report went as far as saying that wastes in the construction industry are mainly caused by “obsolete, myopic control” of the supply chain. Continue reading →