IGLC 23 Global Problems- Global Solutions. Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction. , Perth, Australia.

INTRODUCTION

The International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC) is a network of professionals and researchers in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) who feel that AEC has to be radically renewed in order to respond to the challenges head. The goal is to increase stakeholder value, decrease the huge amount of waste currently present in design and construction activities and to generally improve the performance of the construction industry. New principles and methods developed by the group are based on lean production theory adapted to the construction sector. The IGLC webpage (http://www.iglc.net) presents more information as papers from all previous conferences. The venue of the conference has been alternating between South America, North America, Europe and Asia/Oceania. The 23rd IGLC Conference is the third IGLC to be held in Australia. This year, IGLC is organized together with various other related events. The combined name of all the events is Construct15. Construct15 will bring in a large number of industry practitioners and academics who will also be exposed to the IGLC conference. 85 papers from 17 countries are published in these proceedings, a lower volume than in previous conferences but a great result considering that Perth is a long distance from most of the authors. The papers are organized in 14 tracks which are the same as in previous years although a few tracks (3) did not get any accepted submissions. Table 1 shows the number of abstracts and papers submitted and papers accepted for each track. Production Planning and Control (21 papers) continues to be the largest track, followed by People, Culture and Change (10 papers). BIM and Lean had the same number of papers as last year (7 papers) which may be a sign of its increasing importance to the lean community. IGLC’s are meant for both academics and practitioners and we continue the tradition of including industry papers which may not have the traditional structure of research papers or use scientific methods to support conclusions. Industry papers may present interesting case studies and can be sources of new knowledge, ideas and discussion in the conference. In IGLC 23, the number of industry papers was 5 which is down from IGLC 22 (20 industry papers). This decrease may be partly due to industry collaborating more with academics with practitioner and academic authors in one paper. Industry papers are included within their track in presentation sequence but have a note “Industry Paper” in their header. In this year’s proceedings we will also publish papers presented in the poster session (13 papers). These papers are intended as additional information for interesting posters. However, the poster papers were selected from borderline papers so they usually represent premature research with future potential in the lean construction space.

IGLC 23 Global Problems- Global Solutions.