Who says assembly-line principles can’t be applied to a major construction site?

Prefabricating materials for commercial construction projects is becoming more commonplace. But nowhere in Boston are innovative “lean” construction principles more evident, and fully employed, than at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), where Suffolk Construction is almost finished building a new 21-story dormitory tower at 578 Huntington Ave.

The idea of lean construction is to create a sort of marching band effect among all the trades – plumbers, electricians, drywall crews etc. – so they work in lockstep with one another. The MassArt project, with identical floor plans from floors four through 20, was an ideal template to utilize lean practices from start to finish and the first, and the only project in Boston that has utilized full lean principles from start to finish, according to Suffolk representatives.

Here’s how it works: Lean building requires all trades to buy into the method before the first ounce of concrete is poured into the foundation. Instead of working on an entire floor or multiple floors of a building at once, the trades work one behind the other to finish just half a floor at a time, stopping every two or three days to assess the work done.

One crew puts up the frame for half a floor, say. Then the next trade comes in and installs rebar. Then another crew comes in immediately and pours the concrete, and then they move on to the next half of the floor.

A Tough Sell

“You do work when the next guy in line needs it from you, and you only do what they need,” said Hal Macomber, principal for Colorado-based Lean Project Consulting, a lean building consultant to Suffolk for the MassArt project. “You frame the wall so it’s finished in time for the plumber to do his work roughing in the wall. You treat the next person in line as your customer. Doing work in small batches like that leads to higher quality and far less re-work as opposed to when you do big-batch building.”

Another lean principle is producing heightened reliability in the completion of work. For example, on typical jobs, an electrician’s crew might be given three weeks to do three floors worth of electrical work. If they’re following lean principles, like in the MassArt project, they might get two days to do a half floor of electrical work.

“If they can do what they set out to do every day and finish it, it produces flow on a project and allows for much more work to get done in a short period,” Macomber said.

But in the conservative construction climate of the Northeast – and Boston especially – lean construction methods can be a hard sell for trades accustomed to working on the same schedules for years. That’s in part because it’s a very theoretical idea to get behind, so it’s hard to get people to buy into the fact that it’s a process that works, according to Jim Grossman, vice president of Suffolk’s education group.

“The trouble we’ve always had is that we plan in two- and three-week batches, and there’s no interim milestone to that activity to gauge where you are and what you still need to do,” Grossman told Banker & Tradesman. “Everyone gauges their productivity differently. With the lean process, we all know that in two days, we need to be here on a job. The strongest part of this is, in a day or two, you know if you need to add more manpower, or where you stand from a scheduling perspective. Everyone immediately knows of any impacts or acceleration in work speed.”

Grossman, himself a union carpenter, was skeptical at first. But after the process helped cut a full two months off the original timeline for the MassArt project, he’s a believer.

“Until you put one of these projects to work for you, it’s hard to believe this process works as well as people say it works,” Grossman opined. “Once you see this implemented and how well it works from a planning standpoint and the elimination of waste on the job, it just makes sense to use it. I could really see the guys getting into the process.”

Catching On

One of those guys was Kevin Luczkow, president of Woburn-based Manganaro Northeast, a specialized – and union – drywall shop. While Luczkow said his company already employed many lean practices, they didn’t necessarily name them “lean.” He said the process makes even more sense at an urban site like the thin MassArt tower, where each floor is less than 6,000 square feet, leaving little room to store materials. That’s another aspect of going lean – you only order the materials you need for a few days, and you use as little manpower as possible.

“When Jim Grossman first called us to participate in lean, there was a little concern that we might be averse to the idea,” Luczkow mused. “I said, ‘Look, we already track our manpower.’ But if we’re all participating, we can look around and know that all the other [subcontractors] are buying into this as well. It’s not to say that other subs aren’t efficient, but I don’t know how they manage their manpower. Ours is managed very similarly to the lean process, and others aren’t necessarily.”

But the lean process is far from widespread in these parts and still catching on in New England. Rose Conti, director of Everett-based BOND construction’s special projects group, said that since some clients have been asking general contractors to utilize, or at least talk about, the lean process, her company is starting some lean training programs in the next months or so.

“It’s about efficiency, and we’re all curious these days to see where we can … maximize efficiencies on projects and schedules,” Conti said. “We want to see what some of our competitors are doing. But everyone has to buy into it, it’s not just the general contractor – the subs, architects, owners and designers. We can control our aspect of it, but if the whole team doesn’t buy into it, it’s no good unless we’re all working together.”