Management of Waste in the Building Design Process: The Ghanaian Consultants' Perspective

Abstract

Waste associated with building design is one of the causes of the high cost and slow progress of construction projects in Ghana. Proper management of waste at the design stage is therefore a fundamental step towards achieving speedy delivery of building projects at minimum cost. This paper seeks to examine the level of awareness of sources of waste and the application of waste reduction tools in the building design process by Ghanaian consultancy firms. Data on the design activities of the firms were collected by distributing questionnaires to consultants, while contractors and clients were interviewed. Involvement in various building design processes was also used to obtain data for the study. Results revealed a generally low recognition of sources of waste in the building design process and little awareness of waste reduction tools such as design structure matrix, batch size reduction and set-based design. It was also found that inadequate familiarity of the firms with lean thinking was among a number of limitations to the application of waste reduction tools in Ghana. This suggests that there is a need to improve the awareness of lean design management in both education and practice in Ghana.

Perceptions of lean design management

“…Given that the lean design management field is still developing, it was felt that a questionnaire survey would be useful in gathering the opinions of a wide range of professionals, similar to the approach adopted by Kpamma and Adjei-Kumi (2011). The survey was designed to collect qualitative and quantitative data and was piloted on a small number of volunteers, following which a small number of revisions were made to aid clarity.…”

Critical factors for waste management in office building retrofit projects in Australia

“…From the management perspective, previous researchers have examined problems of different project stages with impact on effective waste prevention and management, such as quality of design specification and documentation (Vrijhoef and Koskela, 2000), construction operation and site planning (Poon et al, 2004a,b), labour work and construction management (Saunders and Wynn, 2004) and material transportation and handling (Kpamma and Adjei-Kumi, 2011).…”

“…In the construction stage, appropriate site planning and selection of construction methods can contribute to waste minimisation and handling (Poon et al, 2004b). Problems in work progress and project management, such as rework of defective items, inefficient work arrangements and lack of supervision and control, will cause waste generation and challenge in both work delivery and waste management (Bossink and Brouwers, 1996;Kpamma and Adjei-Kumi, 2011;Poon et al, 2004b). A list of factors important to C&D waste management is summarised in Section 4.1.…”

Waste in Design Management Operations From the Viewpoint of Project Needs

“…Thus, when optimizing a single design process by minimizing waste, for example, waiting, over processing, or unused employee creativity (Mazlum and Pekericli, 2016), the risk of missing the benefit of value-creating iteration (Hansen and Olsson, 2011) increases. Kpamma and Adjei-Kumi (2011) argued that transferring the information in smaller batches would eliminate waste in the design process. Uusitalo et al (2019a) proposed a lean design management process that is applied to manage the LOD of design information and connect that information to location-based production in smaller batches, thus creating a pull to design information.…”

“…Waste in construction production phase has received a lot of attention due to high cost impact of waste (e.g., Lapinski et al, 2006;Jørgensen and Emmitt, 2008;Sacks et al, 2010). However, research on waste in design management process, which is a crucial part of the whole project, has been lacking the same focus as research on waste in production (e.g., Kagioglou et al, 2000;Smith et al, 2003;Kpamma and Adjei-Kumi, 2011). Hattab & Hamzeh (2017) argue that the traditional construction project management has ignored the impacts of poor design information flow, which potentially forms a significant source of waste for the following activities in the construction process.…”