Cardboard simulation: students experience "lean construction"

Lean Production Simulation

In the 2019 summer semester, Lean Maritime partners Theo Herzog and Holger Segler taught students at the Institute of Geotechnics and Construction Management at Hamburg University of Technology about the idea and methods of "Lean Construction". 

The course in the Construction Processes module of the Master's degree program in Civil Engineering consisted of a theoretical lecture and a practical exercise. With the help of a cardboard simulation, the theory became tangible for the budding civil engineers. At four stations - logistics, pre-assembly, final assembly and quality assurance - around 25 students experienced how the principles of "Takt", "pull" and "flow" lead to less waste, shorter throughput times, more stable processes and predictable results.

TaktPull and flow in the seminar room

"A business game like this shows in a simple way what often happens in production companies," says Theo Herzog. "If, for example, logistics supplies assembly in an uncontrolled manner, the costs of the entire production increase - due to unnecessary search efforts, additional storage space, material damage and longer waiting times. However, if logistics regularly delivers only what is needed at the moment, the sequence of production processes is maintained and waste is minimized." The students experienced this effect within a few hours by delivering, folding, filling and checking cartons. In four runs, they played through different methods, stopped the times, changed the processes, structured the work steps, controlled the capacity utilization and optimized the timing.

Civil engineers of the future

Students benefit from Theo Herzog's decades of experience. They immediately recognize waste in a value chain. "In the exercise, all we do is fold boxes," says Holger Segler. "But later in their careers, these very same people will be working as site managers on a construction site and will have to manage the processes of up to thirty partner companies." Their theoretical and practical Lean construction knowledge from the 2019 summer semester will certainly help them then. At the end of the simulation, the students were able to demonstrate an efficiently managed value chain with clearly structured, controlled and cost-optimized production processes after just a few optimization steps.