The Applied Research On Lean Thinking In Highway Bridge Constuction Management

As China's economy grows rapidly and modernization process continuously improves, highway constructions have re-entered a golden period and have been heavily invested year by year. However, China's road and bridge construction enterprises' management system is backward and extensive. Its quality control, cost control, schedule control and security management doesn't work well as well as its performance efficiency, which doesn't match the pace of the times. With China's entry into WTO, big foreign construction companies flood into China and compete against Chinese counterparts intensively. On the other hand, to be bigger and stronger, China's road and bridge construction enterprises have to establish themselves well domestically and go global as well to improve themselves and cultivate their own competitive advantages.Lean thinking, originated by Japan's Toyota developed, is an advanced management concept and widely accepted in developed countries. The essence of lean thinking is to eliminate waste. By minimizing inventory , carrying out JIT and Pull production and creating non-stop production process, it realizes balanced production, sets up job standardization, keeps improving job so as to eliminate waste, shorten production cycle, improve products' quality, reduce products' cost and improve customers' satisfaction and benefits of companies.After studying the essence, the tools and principle of Lean thinking, the author puts forward lean construction mode of roads and bridges based on China's actual conditions of road and bridge construction projects. This paper takes a road and bridge company in Guangxi as example and gives some useful advice on how to create lean construction site, carry out lean construction process management and establish lean procurement system. In this way, relevant project teams and managers in future can learn from and refer to it.