Construction Supply Chain Management through a Lean Lens

The concept of lean continues to be poorly understood. Although lean and its predecessor concepts, such as the Toyota Production System and World Class Manufacturing, have been discussed for quite some time in the West from the 1980s, the division between mainstream management thinking and lean thinking still persists. Since the 1990s, the concept of supply chain management has been introduced to the area of lean, coined as lean supply (Lamming 1996). However, at the same time, supply chain management has stemmed from other domains including logistics and information management.
From a theoretical standpoint on lean, we could classify supply chain management approaches and techniques either in a lean or non-lean perspective. Non-lean approaches to supply chain management coexist besides lean approaches. Often the problem is a one-sided and exclusive subscription of supply chain management either to the lean or non-lean domain. This problem has two angles: a lack in the understanding and explanation of lean, and a characteristic misinterpretation of supply chain management approaches. The result is that these approaches are sometimes considered lean, sometimes non-lean.