Leanmanagement at HANDLER

As part of the cooperation with Univ. Prof. Mag. DDipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Gottfried Mauerhofer of the Graz University of Technology, HANDLER had the opportunity to contribute to the book “Lean Construction Management, Field Reports from Practice and Science (2020)”.

We see the adaptation of lean management for the brewing industry as an opportunity to make the entire value chain more effective and efficient. In our family business, we have been working with this management method for several years and show in this book contribution how lean management is implemented in practice at HANDLER.  In particular, we would like to emphasize the advantages and future opportunities that lean management holds in timber construction.

We are convinced that the construction industry needs to be reorganized, because production methods are characterized by manual activities that are not planned in detail but left to the executing trades. This leads to inefficient workflows, delays and high costs.

We looked for new solutions and found them in Lean Management. In many areas of our organization, lean management is already being successfully applied under the working title Team.Fixe, an innovative, digitally supported and lean production system that combines lean management methods and Building Information Modeling (BIM).

"Team.Fixe stands for the process along the value chain and ranges from acquisition to warranty."

Peter Schönfeldinger, projekt leader IPA at HANDLER Bau GmbH

Thanks to Lean, we can set three essential impulses in the company:

  1. As a company, we can react quickly to customer needs and expand and secure our market position in the long term.
  2. For our customers, we are able to optimize projects together in terms of costs, quality and time.
  3. By incorporating knowledge, we have been able to make project development less stressful and more transparent for our employees.

The lean idea is sustainable. It runs through the entire company and will also revolutionize the construction industry.