Study on the Application of Lean Construction Supply Chain Management in EPC Project

Although EPC mode has been applied increasingly in the past decade in China, the outcome of its implementation has been proved to be unsatisfactory. Actually, in most of our EPC projects, their supply chains are filled with various kinds of waste and luxurious coordination cost mainly due to uncooperative behavior and adversarial relationship among construction supply chain (CSC) parties/actors. These problems have greatly affected the effectiveness of our EPC project management as well as the comprehensive performance of our CSC. The reason can be largely attributed to the lack of advanced project management thinking and appropriate EPC project management model. This essay is to introduce lean construction supply chain management model to EPC project, aiming at applying lean thinking as well as relevant lean technologies to solve the major problems of our EPC project management and improve the overall competence of our CSC. It also fully discusses some key issues closely relevant to the implementation of LCSCM in EPC project.