Barriers to the Uptake of Concurrent Engineering in the Nigerian Construction Industry

1. Introduction

The construction industry generally has been faced with continuously increasing and sophisticated demands, which call for the most efficient use of the available resources. Many of the services and parts of the structure of modern facilities are now so technically specialized that they have to be designed by many specialists. In response, the construction industry has evolved, with the fragmentation of the production responsibilities into many sub-processes split amongst many participants, who belong to different organizations with different policies, objectives and practices (Aniekwu, 2002). This increases the channels of communication necessary in the design and production processes. The atmosphere created under these circumstances is one of rivalry, bureaucracy, distrust, suspicion, misunderstanding, buck passing, etc. In this situation, the project team is reluctant to make any decision that deviates from drawings or specifications, even if it is an improvement. There is no incentive to improve the process and, needless to say, the resources are not optimized.

Successive National Governments and institutional reports have examined the activities of the construction industry and have commented upon the need for improvement; Simon 1944, Phillips 1950, Emmerson 1962, Bowley 1963, Banwell 1964, Higgins and Jessop 1965, Bishop 1972, Munday 1979, Ball 1980, NEDO 1978, 1983, 1988, Kirmani 1988, British Property Federation 1983, Latham 1993, 1994 and DETR 1998. The reports identified, amongst other factors, the fragmented nature of the construction process and industry (evident in the large number of firms operating within it), the distinct separation of the professions, poor communication, a lack of concurrency, institutional barriers, ad hoc problem solving approaches, lack of trust and collaborative spirit within the client/design/construction team as responsible for the consistently low levels of performance.

Attempts have been made to integrate construction design and production processes through the use of various procurement strategies, such as design and build, fast tracking, project management etc. (Fellows, 1997). Practitioners and researchers have turned to the manufacturing industry as a point of reference and source of innovation. Accordingly, a concept known as CONCURRENT ENGINEERING (CE) has become the focal point of research. This concept advocates the use of a multi-disciplinary project team, whereby participants are brought together during the design stage to determine how downstream issues may be affected by design decisions.

While these problems may be the same the World over, the direct consequence in the global south is a lack of capacity of local industries to implement their national construction objectives, thus relying on foreign skills and technologies. Similar problems in the manufacturing sector have been overcome through the introduction of CE in place of serial or sequential project delivery method (Fig. 1).

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Figure 1.

Conventional product design approach.

The need for adopting concurrent engineering in construction is discussed in several publications (de la Garza et al. 1994, Eldin 1997, Love and Gunasekaran 1997, AbulHassan 2001) and their contributions are summarized as follows:

Countries of the global south, more than any other, are in need of new approaches in project delivery to enhance the capacity of their industries and to deliver their national goals

2. Concurrent Engineering

The term Concurrent Engineering was coined in the late 1980s to explain the systematic method of concurrently designing both a product and its downstream production and support processes (Evbuomwan and Anumba 1995, Huovila et al. 1997). It was proposed as a means to minimize product development time (Prasad 1996). This was necessitated by changes in: manufacturing techniques and methods, management of quality, market structure, increasing complexity of products and demands for high quality and accelerated deliveries at reduced costs. These changes resulted in a shift in corporate emphasis, with the result that the ability to rapidly react to changing market needs and time-to-market, became critical measures of business performance (Constable 1994, Thamhain 1994).

Cleetus, J. of West Virginia University's Concurrent Engineering Research Centre defined concurrent engineering as “a systematic approach to the integrated development of a product and its related processes-from conception to disposal-that emphasizes response to customer expectations and embodies team values of cooperation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision making proceeds with large intervals of parallel working by all life-cycle perspectives, synchronized by comparatively brief exchanges to produce consensus” (CERC Homepage 1998).

In the context of the construction industry, Evbuomwan & Anumba (1998) defined Concurrent Engineering as “an attempt to optimise the design of the project and its construction process to achieve reduced lead times and improved quality and cost by the integration of design, fabrication, construction and erection activities and by maximising concurrency and collaboration in working practices”, This is in sharp contrast with the traditional approach to construction project delivery. Concurrent Engineering is a departure from the traditional sequential approach to product development and thus requires a new design environment and technology in order to support the extensive interdisciplinary co-operation and integration inherent in the concurrent approach (Fig.2).

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Figure 2.

Concurrent Product Design Approach.

The success of CE in manufacturing was one of the main motivations for adopting CE in construction (de la Garza et al. 1994, Anumba and Evbuomwan 1995, Evbuomwan and Anumba, 1995, 1996, Huovila and Serén 1995, Hannus et al. 1997, Kamara et al. 1997, Love and Gunasekaran 1997, Anumba et al. 1999). It is also based on the assumption that because construction can be considered as a manufacturing process, concepts that have been successful in the manufacturing industry can bring about similar improvements in the construction industry. Furthermore, the goals and objectives of CE directly address the challenges that currently face the construction industry.

3. Research Methodology

The theoretical framework for this study is adopted from the national readiness index methods, which was developed at INSEAD (Kirkman et al. 2002, Dutta 2002). It assesses the extent to which the construction industries environment in the global south can encourage the uptake of new technologies and innovations based on the following four key components, each of which is further broken down into relevant factors with many variables:

4. Environment Components

An innovation-conducive environment is a key prerequisite for stakeholders in a given economy to lever new developments, such as CE, for enhanced growth. The business environment of any industry constitutes the atmosphere in which all the industry transactions are carried out. They consist of tangible and intangible systems and structures, which affect and regulate the relations, actions and interaction of all the participants of that industry. This component is analysed under the following four factors:

Usage Component

The stakeholders who are better prepared and show greater interest towards CE will be more likely to use it more extensively and effectively and will lead to increased impact. This link between enablers and usage/impact comes from prior research in the management literature, where all models of total quality management made an explicit distinction between enablers and results (Insead 2002). This component measures the actual and potential usage of new technologies by an economy's main social actors and can be broken down into the following factors:

Individual Usage (5 Variables)

Business Usage (13 Variables)

Government Usage (13 Variables)

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Culture Component

Culture is the code that gives meaning to all of people's actions and acts as the glue that binds all developmental efforts together and creates the value system for all judgments. The ability to communicate and pursue shared goals is hinged on the ability to cross-acculturate. These factors relate to cultural values, which shape the behaviour within the environment in which construction organizations operate. They relate to issues such as the synthesis of attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviours, work ethic, business ethics, attitude to environment, interaction with others, religion and stereotypes that have been passed on or learned. It is about patterns of meaning; it is about shared beliefs, perspectives, and worldviews; it is about shared behaviour, practices, rules and rituals. It is broken down into the following factors:

Individual Culture (5 Variables)

Business Culture (4 Variables)

Government Culture (3 Variables)

63 variables emanating from these components and factors were used to design a questionnaire which was distributed to 50 stratified construction industry stakeholders, including clients, architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, quantity surveyors, contractors, construction material suppliers, specialist subcontractors and developers. The judges were required to rank the variables in their order of importance, with the most important ranked 1 and the least important ranked 63.

The Kendall's coefficient of concordance was used to assess the levels of agreement among the judges, i.e., the consistency of the rankings of the judges. It is a statistical test of agreement among two or more judges, or of the consistency of two or more sets of rankings in a contest. It is a normalization of the statistic of the Friedman test and can be used for assessing agreement among raters. Where the object i is given the rank r_i,j by judge number j, where there are in total n objects and m judges. Then the total rank given to object i is

R i = ∑ j = 1 m r i , j ,

(1)

and the mean value of these total ranks is

R ̄ = 1 2 m ( n + 1 ) .

(2)

The sum of squared deviations S is defined as

S = ∑ i = 1 n ( R i - R ̄ ) 2 ,

(3)

and then Kendall's W is defined as

W = 12 S m 2 ( n 3 - n ) .

(4)

Kendall's W ranges from 0 (no agreement) to 1 (complete agreement). Where R is the sum of the squared differences from the mean rank and K is the sum of k3 – k. k is the number of tied cases for a particular rank, total n = total number of objects and m = total number of judges. S = squared deviation.

5. Data Analysis and Discussion of Results

A total of fifty (50) questionnaires were completed and returned and were analysed. Appendix 1 shows the various variables for the determination of Kendall's W; the ranking of the variables with the most important variable ranked “1” and the least important ranked “63”. It also shows the relative importance of each of the 63 variables in the implementation of concurrent engineering, as a function of the percentage of respondents who ranked them above average or below average. The number of variables assessed n=63, the number of judges m=24, the mean value =837.222, the sum of squared deviation S=6883385 and Kendall's coefficient of concordance W=0.57365

The Kendall's coefficient of concordance W=0.57365 indicates that there is fair level of agreement between the judges on the importance of each factor identified, in affecting the uptake of CE into the Nigerian construction industry. The 5 most influential variables are:

While the 1^st and 4^th variable emanate from the capacity of stakeholders to adopt CE, the 2^nd and 5^th variables relate to the adequacy of the infrastructural environment of the construction industry, which can mostly be ameliorated through government intervention. The 3^rd most influential variable relates to the cultural acceptance and values that shape the behaviour within the environment in which construction organizations operate. Factors of capacity and culture pertain mostly to the segregated individual, corporate or government deficiency or absence of the knowledge of this concept in the operational environment in the global south. This situation could arise from the deficiency in the quality of training and education in these areas or it could result from the level of importance and acceptability attached to it. This will relate to the readiness of the industry in adopting this concept and can be ameliorated through individual effort and education.

Of the 10 most influential variables, 6 variables are related to the infrastructural environment factor which is intrinsic in the structure of the environment and may require an adjustment to some existing conditions in order to remedy them. 3 variables are related to the stakeholders' capacity factor and 1 variable is related to the cultural factor. However, the 4 most important variables are all related to the core issue of the integration of construction processes.

The five least important variables are listed below

6. Conclusion

The following conclusions can be made from the work reported on the barriers to the uptake of CE into the Nigerian construction industry:

The study is part of an on-going research and has presented the subjective results of a study of a stratified group of professionals in the Nigerian construction industry and therefore should not be taken as an absolute statement of the true barriers to the adoption of CE in the Nigerian construction industry. However it is hoped that results may have contributed to the debate in this area.