Lean Design in Hydraulic Infrastructure – River Defenses and Dikes - A Case Study From Peru

Abstract

The construction sector has been changed in different aspects since the implementation of best practices of lean construction and others. It is crucial to remark that those new methodologies have been trying to address construction issues related to the execution part but with little attention to the design stage. In Peru, the use of lean construction started as part of an initiative from the private sector and specifically in the execution part. In that sense, lean design was introduced later and always by the private sector. Little by little the public sector started to get used to lean construction. Nevertheless, in hydraulic infrastructure such as river defenses and dikes the progress of introduction lean design has been insignificant in the country. This paper describes step by step the implementation of lean design in capital projects related to hydraulic infrastructure in Peru specifically for river defenses and dikes.It is the objective of this paper to address the difficulties founded in the implementation and what strategies have been deployed in order to overcome those barriers. Two tools of lean design that were used are: set based design and value stream mapping along with concepts of change management.