LeanPlan Workout™ is a consulting process where plans and elevations are reviewed in-depth to identify significant cost reduction by eliminating errors, construction conflicts, and other wasteful design elements. Although during the workshop we focus our efforts on four specific plans of your choosing, every plan in your portfolio will be impacted for years to come as you adopt a Lean mindset that leads to continual product and process improvement.
In the highly-structured 4-day process, we’ll train your team to identify, remove, and ultimately prevent waste in your product. You’ll partner with 20+ suppliers and trades of your choosing to participate in plan reviews uncovering inaccurate or unnecessary design specifications that add up to thousands in waste. Some may be obvious, yet many of these design issues are small and unnoticeable, but the cost savings are huge.
The LeanPlan Workout is never about “dumbing down” the homes or otherwise lessening their value and making them hard to sell. This proven process won’t cheapen home quality, ruin curb appeal, or damage your relationships. In fact, houses become easier to sell, relationships are strengthened, and your suppliers and trades also benefit from cost reductions by saving labor, material, and wasted trips to building sites.
BENEFITS
Even the most skilled, accomplished architects may not know Lean process well enough to calculate true total cost and value and select the most appropriate design trade-offs. Below are examples of the types of wasteful design that LeanPlan Workout will help you systematically identify and eliminate.
LeanPlan Workout uses a structured approach to teach you how to catch errors in your plans before construction, avoiding time and money spent on wasteful, corrective actions.
The average workout
outputs150-250 improvement ideas addressing hard costs
LeanFilter tool
features>800 questions to reveal
wasteful design
Identifies
approximately$5,000-15,000 design-induced
waste per unit
Your LeanPlan Workout includes:
- The proprietary LeanFilter™ analysis tool that has evolved over 20 years and 200+ Lean implementations. It uses 800+ production and construction process questions, among 20 supplier and trade elements, to reveal design-induced waste in plans and specifications.
- An orientation and field tour to ensure both your participants and our facilitators fully understand your processes.
- Architectural and engineer peer reviews conducted by experienced degreed professionals with multi-state experience who understand cost and value from a builder’s perspective.
- The proprietary Lines & Notes process helps you understand product issues, learn how to correct them, and, most importantly, avoid those issues in future plans.
- A comprehensive tracking spreadsheet to capture all the details on the improvements – including a full description, the cost, difficulty to implement, and potential customer impact.
- Copies of the thoroughly reviewed and marked-up plans, with all improvements recorded for analysis and tracking.
- Complete guidance on who should participate, timing, and what to expect – thanks to our proven process.
PROCESS
Our LeanPlan Workout process is proven, and we’ll provide the structured approach you need to improve your plans. With our LeanPlan approach, you will increase margins without cutting the design elements that customers value.
2-4 weeks prior
Before your workshop starts, our skilled consultants will help you select the appropriate participants, schedule them, and send out communications. Internal Lean participants complete a survey on the company design process and competition.
Our architect and engineer will join you on a field walk to become familiar with your product, discussing the initial observations in an optional executive dinner.
During a half-day orientation, we’ll review the entire process with representatives from each selected supplier & trade, plus the full builder management and Workout team. Roles, commitments, and expectations will be clearly laid out at this time.
4 days
10-20 days after your Orientation, the intense, highly structured Workout Week will kick off, beginning with a field walk for the entire Workout Team, including our architect and engineer. Back off-site, we’ll review processes, assign additional roles, and recap the rules for the week. We’ll break out into Workout sessions with select trades and suppliers, using our proven processes to identify waste in up to 4 of your plans. Our architect will guide all these reviews.
Days two and three continue the plan reviews, with up to 14 additional LeanPlan Workout sessions in total, ending with an Engineering presentation.
Your final day will analyze and prioritize all improvement ideas, ranking them on potential savings dollar amounts, difficulty to implement, and customer visibility. Champions will then be assigned as we develop your 10-Step Action Pan and set you up to start implementing changes immediately.
Participant Selection
For your Lean Team, select employees who understand how design impacts your final product and are open to adopting change and building cross-functional relationships. We will help guide you in your decision.
Examples of Lean Team participants include:
TrueNorth Consulting drew vital information from the group and allowed us to decipher it and find ways to fix the issues. TrueNorth created the environment for our management team to discuss issues openly.
Anonymous Participant
