Last week while I was in San Francisco for the CMAA Conference I was able to meet with Jon Terry, one of the founders with LeanKit, about their ground breaking app. LeanKit provide a online platform to document Lean activities on project sites. Jon and I sat down for a few minutes to discuss three questions:
CAG: How did the founding team get the idea for the platform?
JT: I and the other co-founders of LeanKit worked in the logistics arm of a very large hospital company called HCA. While we were there, we learned a lot about Lean in that area: just-in-time ordering, pull systems, managing flow of materials through a system, etc. We also learned about how those same ideas were being applied to the world of IT, in particular, how sticky note/card walls could be used to visualize processes to improve collaboration among members of a team.
This approach to management, which is called kanban in logistics and IT, was really powerful, but it was challenging to scale up from the team level to apply it for a large organization. We wished there were a software tool available to help but couldn’t find anything we liked. So we decided to start LeanKit to build one. That was about five years ago. Since then we’ve had really great success in the IT and manufacturing/engineering fields with more than 1,000 customer companies around the globe.
A year or so ago, we were approached by the Oracle Primavera team. They were seeing the rapid growth of the Lean and Last Planner approaches to collaborative job site planning and wanted to be able to provide their customers a great solution that worked well with Primavera. We’ve been working with several of their key customers since then to build and pilot our joint offering. And we debuted it at the Lean Construction Institute conference in early October. We were thrilled by the positive reception.
CAG: What makes your platform different from others?
JT: Our goal with LeanKit is to provide our users with something that looks and feels like what they are used to doing on a physical card wall. There are lots of cool things we can do behind the scene to bring the power of technology to bear, but the user interface should stay simple. Everyone understand sticky notes. And while that sounds simple, doing it well, smoothly, and quickly – especially at large scale – is much harder than you might think.
We make it very easy for users to build and edit their virtual card walls. No need for IT to be involved. You can modify your LeanKit board’s layout in much less time than it would take you to re-arrange a physical card wall in your job site trailer. The “back” of each card can carry a lot of additional information: long text descriptions of what needs to be done; attachments like photos, spreadsheets, Word docs, etc.; comment threads that link to tam members e-mail so you can rapidly collaborate about the work; and audit trails of everything that happens to the card so you know exactly “Who did what when?”
All of that data flows into a very powerful analytics package to provide standard charts for things like planned percent complete, lead/cycle time, process variability, etc. And we can also make that data warehouse available to you to develop customer reporting that meets your particular needs. This is very powerful tool for continuous improvement of your company’s processes.
And finally, and I know that this is something you are especially interested in, Rob, we have great mobile apps. For iOS we have two different apps. One matches the virtual card wall of LeanKit in the web browser to give that big picture sense of all the work while on the job site. This is what a superintendent can carry with him to see how well the work is flowing around the job.
The other is what we call My LeanKit, which is available on both iOS and Android. This gives a team member a view of just those cards that he or she has been assigned to. That person, let’s say a trade foreman, can participate in the daily huddle in the trailer each day looking at the whole picture of the LeanKit board with his peers. But then walk out and have a simple view on his phone of just those things he needs to get done. And he can edit those card on the fly to keep the team updated on progress in real-time.
And finally, since we are working so closely with Oracle, all of the things I’ve described can be smoothly and tightly integrated back into P6 throughout the day so that the work on the jobsite and the master schedule are never out-of-synch.
CAG: Where is the platform going next?
JT: Because LeanKit is so flexible, our boards can be setup to represent most any process. For now that’s pull planning, weekly work planning, continuous improvement idea tracking – the essentials of Lean and Last Planner. But we and Oracle think boards could also help simplify and streamline the architecture and design process, materials ordering and tracking, submittals, contract management, you name it.Once the current P6 integration is well established out in the marketplace, the goal is to work on linking LeanKit to other key systems in both Oracle’s and other key industry software vendor’s portfolios.
CAG: To learn more about LeanKit use this link.
The Construction App Guru 