What do great companies do during a downturn?  They turn to productivity and process, invest some time to figure out how to do things better so that when they get real busy again their process and their profits are better! 

There is a great Wiki site called "The Toyota Way" which does a nice job of giving credit to Toyota and to Jeffrey Liker, the Michigan professor and author of the book with the same name. If you have a few minutes today, read the 14 guiding principles to this powerful management philosophy and maybe the next time someone says, our Estimating database is no good," or, "It is impossible to keep the field schedule up to date with all the changes we have," you can ask them to share a little more information with you.  Then, after careful listening you can look for the root cause of these issues to see if there is something that can be done about them.

I can tell you that I was lucky enough to be a key technology partner of Toyota when they were first developing the Lexus car line. The company I worked for made software for designing the stamping dies for the body panels and every time we thought we had it right and it worked better than anything the Toyota team had used before they would come back to us and say. "Very good, very good, we really like what you have done but we will need a few small adjustments."

The literal translation was, "Good try, but you are not done yet."  And what I learned over the 4 years that I worked with Toyota was that no matter how good a partner you were, and no matter how perfect you thought you were they were always very politely asking you to do just a little bit more and be a little bit better.  Back then it was pretty frustrating as I kept pressing my team to "finish the project" but now looking back I realize that the project would never finish even though it made huge productivity strides for them and helped them automate a very critical process substituting advanced surface mathematics and equations for plastic deformation for craftsman type calibration. IT WOULD NEVER BE DONE!

Maybe that's one thing you can take away from reading the summary of the guiding principles of the Toyota Way is that if you wish to drive your department and your company to improve, you are never finished.  If your firm is looking for ways to "always be improving," might we suggest taking a look at the Fridays with Vico archived webinars, along with the BIM Master Class Series (BIM 101, 201, 301, 401, and 501).  You will find a wealth of information, jumping off points for great team discussions, and a convenient way to learn more about BIM and virtual construction.

We will turn the corner soon.  Make sure your team is ready to go with BIM and all the process improvements that it brings to the table.