David Martin

This paper gives a pictorial view of the relevance of lean thinking, particularly the application of muda as a supplement to the sustainable improvement diagnosis technique of existing public office buildings, for a fuller assessment of users’ requirement in Nigeria. The impact of perceived muda was related to the triple bottom line of sustainable development on perceived job productivity and design features and estimated from endusers’ perspective, using diagnostic POE as data acquiring tool, while the confirmatory analysis was done through AMOS, SPSS and MS Excel to explain the relationship between the different variables. The findings showed that muda is inherent in public office buildings and it has highly significant causal effects of 0.66 and 0.76 respectively on perceived job productivity and design features; it also has strong effect sizes of 44% and 58% in explaining both their variances respectively. The result revealed that users require more improvement in facilities as against spatial plan and structures, while there is a medium and positive correlation of 0.48 between perceived job productivity and design features – implying that improvement in design features will consequently lead to improvement in perceived job productivity. The study concludes that lean thinking is relevant to building improvement and could serve as good supplement to the current improvement diagnosis of existing public office buildings, but not as a substitute since data were only collected from users who are not able to provide the required technical data that would otherwise warrant use of equipment.

A major reason why many developing nations have not made significant advancement in sustainable development (SD) agenda is the neglect of existing building stock which forms the bulk of built assets. Although sustainable development is a universal challenge, it cannot be approached in the same way for all nations, but rather practical response can be defined nationally or locally. This paper reviewed literature into the possibility of using an improvement strategy model to eliminate waste and inefficient facilities in existing buildings from occupants and property managers’ view points for sustainability in developing nations using Nigeria as an example while emphasis is placed on the multi-stakeholder/interdisciplinary approach in which each professional in the built environment add discipline-specific data to a single shared model. Many writers have criticized the ignorance of end-user requirements during the construction briefing, highlighting the communications gap between the end-users, designers and owners, and that little had since improved. This paper suggests a way forward in which “bottom-up” improvement policy formulation and subsequent implementation would stem from occupants and property managers rather than “top-down” governance approach in most developing countries. The concepts of lean thinking, zero emission and green building were incorporated into the Building Information Modeling to develop an improvement strategy model for existing buildings with the condition that the use is retained. It is envisaged that improvement would be cheaper financial-wise than to demolish and rebuild; environmental friendly; and bring about an appreciably reduced maintenance cost.