Barriers to Adopting Lean Construction in the Construction Industry—The Case of Jordan

Wassim Al Balkhy,Zoubeir Lafhaj,Rateb Sweis

doi:10.3390/buildings11060222

Abstract

During the last few decades, there has been a greater understanding of the role of lean construction (LC) in achieving better management of construction projects and enabling the application of the fourth industrial revolution in the construction industry (Construction 4.0), which in turn, has the potential to improve the practices and outcomes in the construction industry. This paper aims to identify the barriers to adopt LC practices by taking a case of the Kingdom of Jordan. A questionnaire that included 30 barriers that were resulted from a comprehensive literature review was distributed and filled by 326 respondents from the Jordanian construction industry. The findings showed that the absence of support from the top management, low awareness toward LC, lack of training, and the absence of transparency are amongst the most serious factors that hinder the adoption of LC. The findings in this paper might be helpful to improve the knowledge about LC and support the adoption of new techniques that might improve the performance in the construction industry.

Highlights

Since the early 1990s, and due to the success of lean thinking in manufacturing, noticeable efforts have been made to apply lean thinking or lean construction (LC) in the construction industry
The only study that is available about this topic in Jordan is another paper from the same project [34], in which a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to identify the list of the problems that face the adoption of LC in general; without any geographic determination
This study aims to validate this model by taking the case of Jordan and to identify the most affecting barriers on lean construction adoption from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups working in construction, namely, owners, contractors, and consultants

Summary

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, and due to the success of lean thinking in manufacturing, noticeable efforts have been made to apply lean thinking or lean construction (LC) in the construction industry. Despite the lack of documentation in some cases, some researchers described the results of LC implementation as “revolutionary” [1] These results include improvement in cost saving [2,3,4,5,6,7,8], profitability for projects parties [3,9], labor productivity [3,10,11,12,13], project duration [3,6,7,8,14,15,16], quality [3,4,17], safety and accidents rate [3,4,7,8,9,11,16], sustainability [18,19,20], collaborative work environment and relationships between partners [4,7,21,22,23], inventory management [6,8,24,25], site organization [16,22], scheduling and work predictability [3,6,7,16,21,23], job satisfaction [26], and client satisfaction [3,9,16,17,25]. The body of research and studies on LC adoption in Jordan is very limited [31,33]

Objectives

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion