The coronavirus outbreak has created a global health crisis that has disrupted all industries, including the construction industry. Following the onset of the pandemic, construction workers faced and continue to face unprecedented safety and health challenges. Therefore, construction employers established new safety precautions to protect the health and safety of the workforce and minimize the spread of the virus. The new precautions followed the advice and guidelines offered by different health and safety agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). With construction projects resuming operations, it becomes important to analyze the coronavirus-related health and safety concerns of construction workforce and understand how the new safety procedures can assist on jobsites. Existing studies mostly focused on interviews and surveys with construction companies to understand the impact on project performance and supply chains. However, no study has yet to analyze the United States construction workforce. This paper fills the gap by providing a qualitative descriptive analysis of the COVID-19 complaints data gathered by OSHA from construction jobsites. Information gathered by OSHA includes the jobsite location, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) of the construction company, the type of the complaint (i.e., formal or non-formal), and a thorough description of the complaint. N-grams were employed to analyze the complaints, detect trends, and compile a list of the most frequent concerns reported by the workforce. The analysis of the complaints data identifies safety practices that were most violated, highlights major safety and health concerns for construction workers, and pinpoints geographical areas that have seen a surge in complaints. The study also synthesized the existing research corpus and compiled a list of 100 best practices that construction employers can adopt to mitigate the concerns of the workforce. The findings of this study provide insights into the safety and health trends on construction sites, lay the foundation for future work of academicians and practitioners to address the concerns faced by construction workers, and serve as lessons learned for the industry in the case of any future pandemic.
End user satisfaction is one of the major indices that attest to the success of a project in terms of adding value to the client. Therefore, in order to rate the overall functions of a facility, the fulfilment of end users' needs is to be taken into consideration during the whole project phase (i.e. design through operation). Many clients believe that allocating more resources to the project automatically guarantees the success of the project. What they fail to realize is that in most cases, success, which should be translated in end user satisfaction, relies more on how the project was thought of, planned, constructed and delivered. This paper presents the case study of a high-budget engineering complex. In this study, different end users of the facility were prompted to fill a comprehensive survey about the overall quality of the complex. Interviews were also conducted with the client representative and other parties who were involved during the design/construction phases. After results were analysed and compared, an evident contradiction was detected: end user satisfaction rates were relatively low whereas client's representative overall satisfaction was optimistically high. Lean methods and tools were suggested that could be used to improve the design and delivery of similar facilities and establish a higher end user satisfaction rate.
Industries around the world continue to be reshaped, and the construction industry is no exception. Being one of the oldest industries, construction did indeed undergo major transformations over the years. However, for the past few decades, traditional businessas-usual in construction has reached a stagnation point, adding pressure on organizations to rethink their current processes. Two major transformations changed and continue to change the landscape of the construction industry: Lean Construction and Construction 4.0. While Lean has taken a hold of construction, Construction 4.0, a counterpart of Industry 4.0, is a growing transformation that leverages the power of technology. While the importance of Construction 4.0 has been highlighted, the "how" component of achieving a Construction 4.0 state has not been yet discussed. A process reengineering methodology is needed to assist construction companies in adopting technologies, especially since the existing construction processes have been mostly designed before current technologies became available. Therefore, this paper proposes a holistic conceptual framework to reengineer construction processes in the Construction 4.0 era. The proposed Construction 4.0 Process Reengineering (CPR4.0) framework, which embodies the Futures Triangle methodology, is inspired by Kurt Lewin Change Management Model, and consists of three phases that build on existing reengineering methodologies, people-process-technology methodology, and Lean principles.
Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach is important to deliver value and reduce waste by integrating the stockholders early in a project. Despite its numerous advantages over the traditional delivery systems, IPD's applicability in the Middle East has not yet reached its potential. In Lebanon, the construction market is dominated by delivery practices such as design-bid-build or design-build. The aim of this paper is to examine the Lebanese construction industry experiences in project delivery methods and their attitudes towards shifting to Integrated Project Delivery. Research is conducted through surveys and interviews with industry professionals to investigate the performance of the traditional delivery approaches and the implementation of IPD in Lebanon. The data collected will be used to evaluate and critique the construction industry current project delivery practices, analyze the experts' awareness and attitudes toward IPD delivery method and identify the main barriers that prevents practitioners from implementing IPD.
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