I am finishing up my September column for Professional Builder based on a list of the 10 biggest myths of Lean Building, and I just wrote about one of the most aggravating — the idea that Lean process savings don’t count like saving in sticks and bricks.
There is a tendency to call the former “soft cost” and the latter “hard cost,” and there is a definite value judgment associated with those terms. The propensity to undervalue process savings by builders can hardly be...
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A hotspot is a recurring problem, by focusing on the top ranking hotspot with corrective and preventive action they can be reduced or eliminated allowing you to move to addressing the next ranking issue. These might be the top issues of customer complaints or top construction defects for example. The only way to know where your problems lie is to establish metrics to monitor your key processes. When you have a problem don’t just put a band aid on it, it will come back! Yes correct the...
Here are some interesting results from a 2011 survey by the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.
Growing up near Detroit, I know that old plans are like old cars —sooner or later they start costing you more money than they are worth. It is tempting to hold onto a previous best seller and keep it in the system for no other reason than that you have the bugs worked out. The contracts are set, the variances are low, and the trades know what to do.
The problem arises when the sales start to get soft for the old workhorse; as its sales velocity drops so does the price. The plan is no...
As I write this week’s blog on a plane from Detroit to Vegas, I happened upon an article in the Delta in-flight magazine about healthy eating and guess what? All the things we know about eating eggs and egg yolks, common knowledge learned during the 80’s and 90’s that persists to this day – are flat out wrong. Eggs do NOT raise your cholesterol. They are, in fact, a virtually perfect food, full of protein and raising HDL (good cholesterol) reducing LDL (bad cholesterol) and helping...
When we talk about sustainable home building we focus on energy efficiency and green.
But another level of sustainable building is ensuring that every component of the home was locally or at least Made in the USA! A local builder in Bozeman MT did just that.
Follow this link to the story.
The SMART acronym is an excellent way to evaluate your goals and objectives.
Are they Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely
Specific means that the goal is clear and unambiguous. You will need to consider the following.
During the housing boom, new products were being introduced into the home building market at a staggering rate.
According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (and oft-repeated by our columnist Mark Richardson), in a recent three-year period there were more products introduced than in the previous 100 years for the home building industry.
We’ve seen great innovations in efficiency, design and technology, to name just a few areas, over that time. While some companies have...
If you knew that were losing at least $5K per unit due to one single item of waste in your houses, would you do anything about it? How about $10K? The money is there, inarguable and undeniable, and we have the proof, yet a tiny percentage of builders understand it, let alone try to correct it. Even worse than that, most are afraid to confront it.
Am I claiming that in this market, where every cent counts, that your company is overlooking that kind of money?...
