Towards Enhancement of Lean Practices in the West Bank Construction Industry

In Palestine, the construction sector is one of the key economic sectors, which still suffers from numbers of problems related to time, cost and quality performance. To overcome these problems this sector needs to adopt new trends of management, which is lean construction. The main objective of this study is to investigate factors that support the successful implementation of lean related to management and planning systems, human factors, organizational factors and contractual factors. In addition to, identify lean key performance indicators that measure this successful implementation, and finally linking them with a framework to help the construction companies to adopt lean in the construction process. This research relied principally on analytical and descriptive approaches. The first approach is by reviewing of literatures. The second approach is a questionnaire, which targeted the construction companies in West Bank and is applied on a sample of 153 companies. The results showed positive effects of adopting lean practices such as (wastes identification, value stream mapping, JIT, Pull approach etc.) and successful lean implementation in addition to management commitment and excellence leadership. In addition, the results showed many factors support successful lean implementation related to human, organizational and contractual issues. In this study, the lean successful implantation can be measured through the improvement on the lean Key performance indicators. Finally, all these relations are linked with a framework that helps the contractors to adopt lean practices. The study recommended that the contractors should keep continuous development and learning from the previous projects that they completed to assess the strength and weakness points related to the success factors in order to improve them and this successful should be controlled by the improvement in lean KPIs. Clients are recommended to start injecting mandatory clause in the contract that supports lean construction.