135 Proceedings IGLC-15, July 2007, Michigan, USA A SUBCONTRACTOR’S LEAN JOURNEY: A CASE STUDY ON ILYANG Yong-Woo Kim 1 , Jin Woo Jang 2 , and Glenn Ballard 3 ABSTRACT In most cases, owners of companies or general contractors initiate Lean implementation on construction projects. The value in this case study is that it presents a subcontractor successfully implementing Lean construction on its projects. The case study investigated its motivation for making a Lean transformation, the course of its Lean transformation, and the lessons learned through its Lean journey. The study used interviews with twenty- five key personnel, twelve site visits, and an analysis of twelve documents on twelve projects. Further, it shows that while subcontractors have difficulty initiating Lean implementation beyond their own firms due to their lack of influence, it is possible for them to affect this kind of change. KEY WORDS Case study, Lean journey, subcontractor INTRODUCTION Lean production, which originated from the Toyota Production System, has taken manufacturing industry by storm since the late eighties. It has expanded beyond manufacturing to services, software, health care, and construction. Many papers have been published on how Lean tools are applied to construction projects. However, few have been published on how an organization transformed itself into a Lean organization. Most of the papers focusing on organizations’ change to Lean have assumed that Lean implementation is led by the general contractors (GCs) or owners (Mastroianni and Abdelhamid, 2004; Diekman et al., 2004). Indeed, in most cases, owners or GCs have initiated Lean implementation on construction projects. It has been argued that subcontractors have had limited power to implement Lean on projects because they tend to play a subordinate role to GCs and owners. Some subcontractors are willing and able, but do not have enough influence over the entire project. This paper describes an exception to the rule. The study used interviews with twenty-five key personnel, twelve site visits, and an analysis of twelve documents on twelve projects done by Ilyang construction. 1 Assistant Professor, Constr. Engr. and Mgmt. Program, Constr. Mgmt. and Wood Product Engrg. Department, 153 Baker Lab, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY 13210, 315/470-6839, FAX 315/470-6879, ywkim@esf.edu 2 Ph.D. Candidate, Constr. Engr. and Mgmt. Program, Constr. Mgmt. and Wood Product Engrg. Department, 153 Baker Lab, State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY 13210, jijang@syr.edu 3 Research Director, Project Production Systems Labouratory, University of California, Berkeley. ballard@ce.berkeley.edu