Supply Chain Management in the Ghanaian Building Construction Industry: a Lean Construction Perspective

Abstract

Supply Chain Management (SCM), for the past two decades, has been identified by manufacturing industries as a new way of doing business. Construction, just like the manufacturing and other services industries, is experiencing emerging trends that are aimed at giving ultimate satisfaction to the end user. Lean Construction is a way to design production systems in order to minimize waste of materials, time, and efforts that generate maximum possible amount of value. This research looked into how supply chain management can benefit the Ghanaian building construction industry through the application of lean concept. The purpose of this study is to assess the level of collaboration and coordination in planning of activities among construction industry players, and investigate into the sources of waste in construction. The study is considered as qualitative case study. Data is collected through questionnaires, in depth interviews and direct observation of ongoing projects on KNUST campus. One sample t test is used to analyze the data. The findings pointed out that the level of coordination and collaboration in planning among industry players were very appreciable though there still exist room for improvement.

Opportunities and Challenges of Green-Lean: An Integrated System for Sustainable Construction

“…Lean construction aims at minimization of wastes and transforming it to value, which is what the customer is willing to pay for [30][31][32]. To make this happen, it utilizes a variety of techniques such as just-in-time (JIT) [33,34], total quality management (TQM) [35,36], total productive maintenance (TPM) [37], supply chain management [38], and effective human resource management [39][40][41]. In the lean concept, wastes are not limited to construction material; they include all sorts of inefficient use of labor force, equipment, and other resources in the project [42].…”