Crystal Lean Solutions 

Crystal Lean Solutions, formerly Crystal Business Solutions, was founded by Maria Ryan in Limerick back in early 2008. Believing that a company’s success is defined by its people, Crystal Lean helps businesses to develop staff’s capability in Lean Thinking. With careers spanning up to 30 years in Operations Management, Crystal Lean’s team offers a diverse range of services including Lean Coaching, Lean Training, Lean Resources, Strategic Development, Data Driven Decision Making, Funding Support/Advise and Change Management. By developing capabilities in Lean Thinking, they systematically deliver results that make your job easier.

Crystal Lean had an application, CoPlan Pdx, that followed lean management principles and best practice guidelines for planning and managing construction projects, for meeting targets and maintaining high productivity while learning from mistakes. Using this application, users are able to create and manage weekly work plans, which enabled better coordination of the workforce, and proactive constraint management, and are able to report back on the events of the working week to enable continuous improvement of the planning process. The team were having issues with this application, particularly with a lack of remote access to the databases, software responsiveness and version control. The software was in bad need of bespoke application modernisation. 

We replicated CoPlan Pdx cell for cell, starting with resolving construction issues with the constraints log. We created a VPN solution that allowed remote access to the cloud. From there we developed an Application Programming Interface, or API, for the existing application. Using Windows Forms we structured a VB application that will help create projects and alter their settings.

It was crucial that the product helps with planning and workload management. We installed a wide variety of functions to keep track of projects and learn from any potential mistakes, offering the opportunity to continually improve and streamline the workload. The application grew to offer pre-planning systems over a period of many weeks. Once the application was ready, we assisted in building WordPress sites for Crystal lean for promotion and selling of Coplan.

Coplan has now grown into the bespoke design and manufacturing sector, and we have produced CoPlan Px, with changes to the software that look at the capacity of the workforce to visualise how  equipment and users are loaded over time. The key difference between the two is that the original offers a tool to avoid stacking of work crews or over-crowding work spaces on a given project, whilst CoPlan Px facilitates management of equipment and people capacity across multiple projects.