For decades construction labour productivity has been stagnated or declining. Changing this issue requires new knowledge on the labour-intensive construction production system. The work sampling method was applied to collect data from 3 renovation construction production systems. It quantifies observations of on-site work and enables deep analyses of how time is used. The analysis revealed that the renovation projects had a baseline of value-adding-work (VAW) time on 29.5%. It further identified 5 system behaviours outlining how VAW and Non-Value-Adding work (NVAW) time behaves. The new knowledge of how both VAW and NVAW time behaves advances knowledge on how time is wasted in construction projects and opens new branches of future research. The findings are furthermore of potential use to industry professionals who work with process improvement in renovation projects because they provide, among others, answers to how targets can be defined for both VAW and NVAW.
Labor productivity in construction has fallen behind other industries in most of the world and has declined continuously for decades in the US. To change this, the construction industry needs to know where to focus. This research aims to show how important craftsmen efficiency is for national construction labor productivity (CLP) development. Statistical analysis was used to compare craftsmen efficiency and CLP data from North America (NA) in the period 1972-2010. Craftsmen efficiency data were extracted from published work that measured direct work (DW) through work sampling, and CLP data were extracted from national databases. A statistically significant relationship between DW and CLP was established. This revealed that adding 36 seconds of DW to every work hour could yield a yearly return of 5.4 billion USD to the NA gross domestic product (GDP). Results show that more focus on activity and project level efficiency is crucial for changing the trends of national CLP. Industry leaders and policy makers now have a solid foundation for taking corrective actions for an industry plagued by low productivity.
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