In this podcast, I share a webinar that I gave with Matt Horvat of Lean Portland, and Kelly Stevens from The Rebuilding Center.

We were asked to talk about our experiences applying Lean to the building reuse industry, which includes work over the past few years with The Rebuilding Center and Habitat for Humanity Restore (multiple locations).

The slides (PDF) are available for download here.

Links

* Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA)* The Rebuilding Center* Lean Portland

Transcript

Brion (B):  I

wanted to share with you guys a webinar that Matt Horvat and I put together for

BMRA. They are the Building Materials Reuse Association. The Executive

Director, Joe Connell, reached out to us. We had met Joe when he was the Director

over at Portland Restore, which is part of Habitat for Humanity, soon after he

took the BMRA job but really liked what we presented and wanted to share that

with this industry. They’re a nonprofit that promotes the vibrant building

materials economy and that’s part of A World Without Waste. And so really cool

organization that they have going on and they put on conferences and they have

memberships with a lot of people in the reuse or deconstruction industry, so

lines up well with organizations like the Rebuilding Center that we work with

and it worked out the last couple of years.

The presentation we put together was talking about Lean in

the building reuse industry and we had some help with the presentation from the

Rebuilding Center. Cody Stevens was able to support us during the webinar,

which was great, and Chris Larson, who is the process improvement person at the

Rebuilding Center now, he was helping us put together some of the slides and

some of the photos that were there.

So in preparation for this webinar, Matt and I went over to

the Rebuilding Center and got a view of some of the recent updates and they’ve been

really making some changes. If you’re in the Portland area, please check them

out and you’ll notice that they’ve slowly been chipping away at some of the

ascetics on the outside and building some infrastructure in place, so really

cool what they’ve been doing lately. Then Matt also did a gemba walk over at

one of the deconstruction sites in Vancouver, Washington and took some notes

and comments of where he saw some opportunities.

That was what we were trying to convey in the seminar here, so hopefully, you

enjoy it. Check it out, let us know what you think, and thanks for listening.

Joe (J):  This is Joe

Connell, Executive Director for BMRA, as I was just saying before I remembered

to record. We’re hearing from Brion Hurley and Matt Horvat today about Lean principles

for building reuse. I ran reuse centers for 13 years; I know all too well what

it takes and what the struggles are, and I started to say earlier, I wish that

I had known Brion 15 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of agony. We’re hoping today that Brion and Matt

can teach us something about Lean principles and how they relate to our

industry.

One reminder before we go,