Masonry Magazine June 2000 Page. 9
FEATURE ARTICLE
IMPROVING Productivity in CONSTRUCTION
By James J. Adrian
Productivity is commonly defined as follows:
Productivity = Units of Work Placed / Man-Hour of Effort
Examples would be number of block or brick placed per man-hours. It should be noted that while the above definition is a widely accepted definition, it can be misleading in that man-hours is in the denominator. This might lead one to believe that the only way to increase productivity is to work harder, to make more labor effort. In reality there are many ways to increase productivity without working harder. The theme of the improvement ideas and programs set forth in this article are to work smarter, not harder.
Given the above definition of productivity, the United Stated Department of Commerce has measured the average annual increases in construction productivity to be less than one percent a year for the last ten years. This is illustrated in Figure 1 below.
The average annual increase in construction productivity of 0.8 percent compares to a 2 to 3 percent annual increase for all US industries.
Unfortunately during the same time period when construction productivity has been nearly flat, construction costs have risen. During the past ten to fifteen years, construction costs have risen each and every year, sometimes in excess of five percent in a given year. These increasing costs and flat productivity has put downward pressure on the profitability of many construction firms to include the masonry firm. Given the fierce competition of the bidding process, a firm may not be able to pass on added material and labor costs to the project owner. As shown in Figure 1, for many firms this decreasing profitability owing to the failure to increase productivity while costs have increased has resulted in the risk of the bid exceeding the planned profitability in the bid.
Another way of looking at productivity in the construction process is to look at the composition of the eight hour work day. Documented job site studies performed by the author indicate that between forty and sixty percent of a typical construction day is for non-productive time. One can consider non-productive time to include time associated with workers waiting for instructions, doing redo work, taking advantage of a lack of supervision, double handling of material, etc. In addition, non-productive time includes a certain amount of what can be referred to as unnecessary time such as a worker carrying boards from one location to another merely because the material was not effectively stored in the proper location in the job site layout process. An example of such a work day is illustrated above in Figure 2.
OPPORTUNITY TO INCREASE CONSTRUCTION PRODUCTIVITY
It is not being suggested that the solution to the problem of low construction industry productivity or non-productive time is an easy problem to solve. The construction process is a difficult one. Problems such as a variable environment to include precipitation, temperature variations, and the complexity of the building process itself are just a few of the problems that most non-construction industries do not have to confront.
Independent of the difficulties associated with improving construction productivity, it should be pointed out that tremendous opportunity exists to improve productivity. If the construction process can be correctly identified as having fifty percent