ABSTRACT
Lean came into the construction industry in 1993 with the formation of the International
Group for Lean Construction (www.iglc.net), followed in 1997 by the Lean Construction
Institute (LCI) in the United States (www.leanconstruction.org), and the Egan Report in the
United Kingdom in 1998 (Egan, 1998). Two primary drivers can be identified, one external
and the other internal to the construction industry. The external driver was the superior
performance of Japanese motor vehicle manufacturers discovered in MIT’s International
Motor Vehicle Program and reported in The Machine that Changed the World (Womack et al.,
1990). The internal driver was widespread dissatisfaction with construction industry per-
formance. These two drivers coincided in the Egan Report’s call to apply lean manufacturing
methods to the construction industry to radically reduce cost, time to market, defects, and
accidents.
