The Practice of Lean Construction Principle in Jimma Municipal Road Infrastructure Projects: The Client’s Perspective

Abstract

The lean construction management system has recently got traction by different firms and organizations to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. Provided the importance of this system, this study aims to assess the Practice of Lean Construction Principle in Jimma Municipal Road Infrastructure Projects. With this objective the researcher targeted to create more understanding and momentum for the implementation of a lean management system in Jimma municipality infrastructure projects. All employees of Jimma Municipality involved with road projects were surveyed. Quantitative data were collected using a survey questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive and inferential tools. In both cases, the result reveals that the presence and practice of lean principles in road projects management were low. Among the Management Philosophy/Activity /Practice related to lean concept assessed avoiding defects (60.7%) and increasing output flexibility (60.7%) were reported to have more familiar compared to the rest. Whereas the use of prefabricated materials (67%) were less familiar in municipal road projects management. In addition, the level of awareness about the lean concept is encouraging (according to the survey result shows that majority of the participants about 60% had awareness) but the level of awareness is shallow. The research also examined the extent of the application: the response about the extent of application of lean tools/techniques in the organization summarized as 16.7% very little application, 23.3% apply sometimes, 26.7% apply often and 20% apply always, the rest 13.3% respond don’t apply. Accordingly the result shows that the extent of application of lean construction principle is very low. The respondents were also asked about the future implementation of lean construction: the overwhelming majority of the respondents about 90% agreed future implementation of lean construction for project management system. The study also points out that, use of non-standard component and improper resource management stands out as the major challenges because these two attributes receiving by far the highest level of agreement which was 47.2% among the participants. Finally, the last research question were answered through inferential analysis & the inferential analysis result shows that there is no significant difference in the level of lean concept awareness between employees in their response to the familiarity, implementation of the lean concept & barriers to lean implementation. Further, the result did not show a significant awareness difference between employees in terms of the lean construction management concept based on their demographic characteristics.