LCI Blog: Lean Lessons in Automotive (and How They Apply to Your Next Project)

How do you design and build a three-story, 800,000-SF automotive paint shop – part of the City of Detroit’s first new general assembly automotive plant in 30 years – in just 16 months?

You get lean.

That’s what the team of Giffin, Ghafari, and Barton Malow – and its subcontractor partners along the way – came together to do when building the Stellantis (then Fiat Chrysler Automotive) Mack Avenue Paint Shop in Detroit starting in 2019.

In order to meet Stellantis’ aggressive timeline to accelerate its time to market, the team embraced a collaborative Design-Build delivery method. The delivery method, which is about 23 percent faster than conventional CM at Risk and some 33 percent faster than Design-Bid-Build, aligns stakeholders early, facilitates the simultaneous engineering of process facilities and equipment installation, uses holistic programing to streamline procurement and production, and leverages 3D modeling and other technologies.

Ideally, the end result is more than a quality finished project – but one that is also on time, on budget, and built safely.

The Giffin / Ghafari / Barton Malow team successfully completed the Stellantis Mack Avenue Paint Shop and deployed the same delivery method in building a subsequent paint shop in Warren, Michigan. But this Lean example is just one of the many that are happening in construction today.

Read the full post at the Lean Construction Institute’s blog, Lean Buzz, here.