Barriers of Last Planner System: A Survey in Vietnam Construction Industry

Abstract

Construction industry is overwhelmed by delay and often has suffered cost and time overrun. In this context, Last Planner System (LPS) has been considered as a very useful tool for the management of the construction process. Many previous studies have reported its effectiveness in construction performance. This study aims to evaluate the level of importance of the Last Planner processes in the Vietnam construction industry (VCI), and analyze the existing barriers when implementing these processes in construction management. These barriers were collected based on previous studies from International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC). A survey was carried out through questionnaire. The respondents are been experienced people in construction project management. There are four processes of LPS that were investigated including master schedule, phase schedule, lookahead plan, and weekly work plan. The results showed that master schedule is the most important item when performing a construction project in the VCI. The highest degree of agreement belongs to 'owner - contractor' pair with 77.1% importance indices; whereas the lowest belongs to 'consultants - contractors' pair with 63.8% importance indices. Eventually, three barrier factors were extracted from factor analysis technique with 62.2% of variance explained.