Improving Labour Productivity in Masonry Work in Nigeria: The Application of Lean Management Techniques

Abstract

The performance of local contracting firms is very important to any nation’s economic growth. This performance is hitched on the firms’ construction efficiency which can be improved by increasing productivity. Therefore this paper examines the analysis of labour output for masonry work in the construction of six bungalow buildings in Abuja metropolis. The objective was to determine the level of labour productivity of contractors handling the construction of bungalow buildings and to identify gaps in levels of productivity and reasons for the differentials. The computation of the performance indexes that is project Waste Index (PWI), performance ratio and disruption index (DI), it was learnt that about 50% of the projects studied were poorly managed. The projects had low productivity rating. The other 50% performed well. The PWI values computed for the project studied ranged from 0.0106 to 0.1940. It was observed that three of the projects had PWI values lower than 0.1 which is an indication of good performance and three had values greater than 0.1. Three of the projects had Performance ratio (PR) value of 1.1389, 1.1689 and 1.9662 which showed poor performance. It was observed that low outputs were accomplished with high labour inputs. Other factors found out by direct observation for the non performing projects were distance of materials from work stations, system of daily payments method without adequate supervision and shortages of materials on site. It was recommended that the site managers of each of the non performing projects should learn reasons for gaps and make necessary adjustments in order to improve performance by raising labour productivity. It was also recommended that the lean benchmarking task should not be once for all exercise among the firms investigated but should be a continuous practice until the best practice height is attained.