Project-based knowledge management system for lean construction

Abstract

Construction inefficiency most frequently occurs in the construction knowledge area. Knowledge management (KM), then, through sharing best practices and learning from past projects, can be an effective means of implementing lean construction. However, many KM initiatives have failed to meet this expectation, due to the top-down, controlled approach and an ineffective transferring mechanism. To address this challenging issue, this paper proposes a project-based KM system that helps to acquire and transfer knowledge, using blogs on a project basis instead of knowledge maps. Project blogs store various types of project information and knowledge including communications among project participants, and interconnecting personal blogs of project participants with project blogs would improve collaboration between project participants. Moreover, the proposed KM system could realize information pulling of lean construction by delivering prerequisite knowledge of an activity at the time that project participants are ready for that activity. Stored knowledge, with the contextual information extracted from the schedule database, is automatically pulled to project participants. By extending the concept of this project-based approach, this paper also suggests a web portal providing ASP service. This portal would serve as a database for lean construction best practices and thereby strengthen industry-wide sharing of live knowledge.