Risk Management In The Pakistan Construction Industry: A Contractors’ Perspective

The Construction Industry in Pakistan has gone through a rough patch with its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the three years up to FY2002 being well below the two percent as compared to a CAGR of nearly four percent for the overall GDP of the country during this period. This shows that instead of being a source of economic stimulus, the construction industry has actually lagged behind the rest of the economy in terms of growth. This negative perception regarding the macroeconomic and political instability and the law and order situation has deterred serious investors (JCR, 2003).

The problems facing the construction industry of Pakistan has persisted despite efforts made. It is important that the construction industry of Pakistan is more fully understood in order for more appropriate solutions, relevant to its contexts, to be found. This industry requires separate, special treatment.
Now there is a need to search the difficulties and problems being faced by the Pakistan construction industry, along with recommended solutions. Researchers, Developers, Builders and Contractors working together can identify the solutions to the problems and can boost the Pakistan Construction Industry.

Construction is a high-risk business which haunts every participant in the business, the project owner, construction companies, consultants, bankers, financial institutions, vendors & suppliers and even the service providers, each has his own fears of facing risks in the conduct of business. Risk management is important part of the decision making process in the construction. Risk is also the object of attention because of time overrun associated with the construction projects. Although the risk analysis and management is important to the activities of the construction industry, little is known about the industry response and the techniques employed for the risk management in the Pakistan construction industry. There is a need to investigate the construction industry's perception of risk associated with its activities and the extent to which the industry uses risk analysis and management techniques.

Mr. Asif Hameed Malik made a study which main objective to investigate the risk management practices of the construction contractors in public sector projects of Pakistan and to recommend the appropriate risk management techniques, which better fit the Pakistan context and environment.

To achieve his objective, the sub-objectives can be identified as follows:
a) To evaluate the current attitude of the contractors regarding the importance of risk and risk allocation.
b) To uncover the underlying relationships between the identified risks using the factor analysis.
c) To investigate the difficulties and the benefits relevant to the risk management and the current usage of risk management techniques in the construction organizations.
d) To propose recommendations to the contractors to cope with the major risks in the industry and manage risk effectively in long terms.

Conclusions

The following are the conclusions based on the work carried out and the results of the analyses.

1.Risk Importance and allocation

a. The ten-top major risks identified are: (1) Delays in resolving contractual issues; (2) Delayed payment on contracts; (3) Political uncertainty; (4) Financial failure; (5) Scope of work definition; (6) War threats; (7) Suppliers/subcontractors poor performance; (8) Change in work; (9) Defective design; (10) Labor and equipment productivity.

b. Out of thirty-one listed construction risks, thirteen construction risks are allocated to the contractor; seven to the owner and eleven are shared between the contractor and owner. Although, it is generally recognized that the risk should be transferred to the party that is in the best position to deal with it, the survey indicates that Pakistani contractors are often responsible for most of the risk. Contractors consider themselves responsible to take care of the risks associated with physical and environmental problems. The risks of this type include differing site conditions and adverse weather conditions.

c. Experienced engineers have rated the importance of risk events lower than less experienced engineers. The main reasons are experience level and management level of the experienced engineers. The experience gained in construction life may have enabled the engineers to develop additional ability and competency in managing, anticipating and solving possible problems. This result is contradictory to the findings of the Dung (2004) and Thuyet (2003), in which they concluded that experience level has a no big influence on engineers’ attitude. However this result is supportive to some extent to the findings of Santoso (1999).

d. The result shows that the respondents working in large companies have rated the risks less, which are of technical and managerial nature. This may be due to the reason that the large contractors have formal management practices in their organizations and also they have enough resources to mitigate the encountered risks more efficiently than the small contractors.

2. Grouping of identified risks

Factor analysis is applied to find any interrelationship existing among the risks in terms of their importance.The components extracted are labeled as managerial and technical risks; project scope and design risks; political, economic and regulatory risks; contractual delay risks and; site and weather risks.

3. Risk management practices

The results of risk management practices are similar to the findings of the other surveys conducted in developing countries by Dung (2004) and Thuyet (2003).
a. Importance of systematic risk management is well recognized in the Pakistan construction industry while the practice is far behind its importance.

b. The importance of training cannot be ignored in any organization. Conversely, the construction organizations in Pakistan provide poor job training in risk management to their staff.

c. There is a lack of formal risk identification teams in the organizations. Also the roles and responsibilities are not stated. Even sometimes only one person is responsible for the risk management process.

d. The main difficulties in the risk management process are lack of qualified experts, lack of budget and top management commitment.

e. Qualitative risk analysis techniques are more popular due to their simplicity and effectiveness. In qualitative analysis, the most used tools are checklist, brainstorming and interviewing. Quantitative risk analysis techniques have been rarely used due to limited understanding and experience.

f. The effectiveness of the risk responses in the descending order are: risk transfer, risk reduction, risk retention and risk avoidance.

g. Preventive actions are used to avoid and reduce risks at the early stage of project construction. Produce a proper schedule by getting updated project information and produce a proper program using subjective judgment are the two most effective risk preventive actions.

h. Mitigative actions are remedial steps aimed at minimizing the effects of risks. The most effective risk mitigative methods are to coordinate closely with subcontractor and to increase manpower and/or equipment.

i. Contract management is quite well performed, helping much risk allocation through contracts. Insurance serve as a second risk transfer for the parties involved. However, in reality they face lots of difficulties on the way of finding the insurance. High premium in insurance buying, long claim coverage procedure and lack of qualified experts are the most perceptible problems in purchasing insurance.

Recommendations

Based on the research results, the recommendations are made to the construction contractors to cope with the major risks in the industry and to improve their risk management practices.

1. Strategies to Mitigate the Major Risks

For projects to be successful, it is extremely important that the major risks affecting the projects should be thoroughly examined. The causes and characteristics must be carefully analyzed in order to propose the most appropriate and practical strategies to mitigate them. For the top-ten major risks, the proposed strategies to mitigate them are shown in the table below.



2. Strategies to Improve the Risk Management Practices

a. Integrate risk management in organizational culture in which everybody is a risk manager. This is more important than developing and issuing extensive policies and procedures. Management of risk is embedded in the management philosophy.

b. Implementing risk management requires resources. Investments will be required in: training, developing processes and techniques, management systems, specialist groups. Senior management must be committed to support the initiative with the required resources.

c. Open communication is necessary for risk management to succeed. Without open communication risk management cannot be "everybody's business". Managers require direct communication channels up, down and across their business units to help identify risks and take appropriate actions. Information must be shared.

d. Informal and formal teams are a mechanism that organizations should use to manage risks. Teaming brings together various risk attitudes and brings fresh thinking to issues and solutions. It also focuses diverse disciplines on common objectives.

e. A common business risk language enables managers to talk with individuals in terms of everybody understanding. This is important also in cases where everybody is expected to manage risks.

f. Set up a responsibility center for risk management. A Chief Risk Officer (CRO) who defines consistent approaches to managing risk should head it. The CRO is the organizational risk champion and is responsible for providing leadership and establishing and maintaining risk awareness across the organization.

g. Communicate the risk performance to top management and stakeholders/ shareholders. The reports should outline the major risks and how they are managed.

h. There is a need for risk management training, as part of a corporate training curriculum. Topic areas include: objectives for managing risk: risk-awareness, risk assessments, safety and legislative requirements.

i. The authorities should implement the performance assessment scoring system (PASS) as a mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of a contractor's ability and to change the attitude of the contractors to simply win the projects rather than to deliver the projects to specified standards.

j. The internal audit function plays a key role in implementing risk management throughout an organization. Examples of this practice are: monitoring and reporting on the management of significant risks and reviewing processes for managing risks.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

ABSTRACT

The research study, on the basis of a questionnaire survey, describes the perception of construction contractors in Pakistan about the risk associated with its activities and the extent to which the industry uses risk analysis and management techniques.

The study has investigated the perception of the contractors regarding risk importance and risk allocation. The purpose was to provide insight into the current attitude of Pakistani contractors towards construction risk allocation and also to examine the importance of different risk categories.

Risk management practices in the construction industry of Pakistan have also been presented and discussed. First the organizational culture and support to the risk management is described and it is found that the importance of systematic risk management is well recognized in the Pakistan construction industry while the practice is far behind its importance. Then the extent/scope, responsibilities and problems in the risk identification; risk analysis; risk response; risk monitoring and control processes are discussed. The research results indicated that the application of the formal risk management techniques in the Pakistan construction industry is limited. It is also investigated that there is a lack of formal risk management teams in organizations and roles and responsibilities are not stated. The main difficulties during the risks management processes in the descending order are: the lack of qualified experts; lack of budget; complexity of tools and techniques; lack of top management commitment and support; and lack of historical data. This research also presents two types of risk management methods: preventive, which are effective at the early stages of the project life, and mitigative, which are remedial actions aimed at risk minimization during construction. At the end, risk allocation between the parties involved, through contract and insurance, is discussed.

The Integrated Performance Indicator For Airport Pavement Evaluation

Modern lifestyle, high competitive business and globalization considered the speed of transmission to convey cargo and passengers. Aviation becomes one of alternatives to sustain that purpose. Many Airports have been constructed with its modules such as a ground access facility connecting the airport to the nearest city, parking structures, an air-traffic control tower, a terminal building, jet ways, apron(s), taxiway(s), and runway(s).

In Airfield facilities, the major problem occurred after the construction finished, is the deterioration of pavement that caused from:

1)Traffic load exceeding the forecast during pavement design stage
2)Fatigue effect from repetitive loads
3)Surface weathering
4)Faulty construction technique

The above four problems will shorten the airfield service life; nevertheless, Airport Pavement Management System (APMS) has been implemented to solve these issues so that safe operation will be taken place to the pavement in time. Airport infrastructures require the comprehensive maintenance program like other infrastructure for preserving its runways, taxiways, apron, and pavement area in order to keep the airfield performance above acceptable level.

Airport pavement condition assessment usually focuses on the runway by measuring some of its features such as load-carrying capacity. Human factor (Pilot and User) always overlook during condition assessments, although they are not the part of the airport pavement but their feeling from airport utilization can notify the condition such as pavement roughness, pavement friction, riding quality or services quality. Human factor that always change sensitively can fulfill the equipment capability. The concept that considered only solitary indicator becomes obsolete.

The equipments and software for APMS especially NDT for condition assessment are quite high cost, also the indicator gained from those equipments are still one aspect consideration. The difficulty burden on administrator who wants to complete all condition assessment but the budget allocation might not be affordable. The attractive choice is using available equipment and free software with integrating indicators concept that will spend less money and achieves identical purpose.

User’s requirements regarding to airport management always increase until they can make sure that the airport pavement condition is safe enough and ready to support aviation. Any airport agencies that can make more user confidence will get more advantages in high competitive aviation business.

New concept developed from infrastructure’s performance indicators (Hudson et al., 1997) will be conducted to solve these problems to reach the objectives below.

Mr. Yongyot Rotchaya made a study which main objective is to develop an integrated performance indicator for airport pavement; it is derived from different aspects of airport performance, which are Maintenance Unit Perception, Safety Perception, Physical Condition, and Structural Integrity.

The secondary objectives of his study were specified as follows:

1)To identify each different aspects of performance measurement for airport pavement.

2)To apply AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) to infrastructure management system as a weighting factor during the airport pavement evaluation.

3)Find the most influential factor to the Integrated Performance Indicator (IPI).

Conclusions

Different aspects of the airport pavement condition used to have its own condition indicator and some aspects has never considered before, such as safety issues. In this study, many aspects are combined into one indicator. People who are working close to the pavement are specified to be rater for particular indicators. These groups are supposed to give exact score to represent actual pavement condition through questionnaires, which had been prepared and adjusted in order to be suitable with each group. After the questionnaires had been distributed to two airports, the respondents gave a good cooperation in answering the questionnaires. As mentioned to the excellent competency of respondents, the achieved indicator can give high confidence to represent airport pavement condition. As well as the well-known indicator like PCI; high-technology tool like UPV are used to obtain the pavement condition.

Previously, the Analytical Hierarchy Process has been used as an important tool in supporting decision-making in complex issue that can be structured it as hierarchy such as marketing strategic planning, and finance. AHP applications in the non-profit organization are very few. The reason may be the problem in non-profit organization is not complex. Now, the situation is changed, non-profit organization like Royal Thai Air Force needs the effective tool to make decision under limited budget and other factors such as time constraint or effective utilization for all assets. One set of questionnaire had been distributed to engineers in Directorate of Civil Engineering, who has high experience in airport pavement design and management. Those engineers are also willing to give a precise answer and waiting attentively for new concept which will be useful for airport pavement management system.

Other conclusions:
a)The Integrated Performance Indicator, which is derived from integration of Maintenance Unit Perception, Safety Perception, Physical Condition, and Structural Integrity, can represent the actual condition of airport pavement.

b)The different aspects of infrastructure which are condition-related components are adapted from Hudson et al (1997) concept. In practical, the concept has been adjusted to be suitable with Air Force infrastructure and be appropriate with available tool or personnel, so the Service and User Perception is substituted by Maintenance Unit Perception. This study can find the indicators to represent each condition aspect.

c)Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been applied to give appropriate weight factors for isolate indicator in this study. This study is one of the attempts that try to apply AHP to current infrastructure management system, which is more complex and change sensitively now.

In the past, the Analytical Hierarchy Process has been used as an important tool in supporting decision-making in complex issue that can be structured it as hierarchy such as marketing strategic planning, and finance. The problem in non-profit organization is not complex so the AHP is not used widespread. Now, the situation is changed, non-profit organization like Royal Thai Air Force needs the effective tool to make decision under limited budget and other factors such as time constraint or effective utilization for all assets. The AHP illustrated its powerful capability for decision-making in non-profit organization like Royal Thai Air Force.

d)From the AHP, the most influential factor to the Integrated Performance Indicator (IPI) should be the one that has the highest weight factor. Physical condition is supposed to be the most influential factor but short study period can not give significant change in PCI value. Conversely, Maintenance Unit Perception, which has the second rank weight factor changes significantly and affects the overall indicator (IPI) obviously.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

In the past, most agencies considered only one aspect of infrastructure condition to be a tool in decision-making then performed maintenance activities. This practice has some shortcomings, which lead to wrong interpretation and misunderstood about actual condition. It is the fact that one indicator can not represent overall performance of infrastructure. In order to overcome those shortcomings, the Integrated Performance Indicator has been developed by adaptation from Hudson et al (1997) concept; it clarifies four approaches to find infrastructure performance. Nevertheless, the original concept was adapted to fit with available tool and personnel, and then the approaches are changed to be Maintenance Unit Perception, Safety Perception, Physical Condition, and Structural Integrity. Each aspect of infrastructure performance is represented by isolate indicator, and then multipliers are calculated by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to find the appropriate weight factors before the combination into the Integrated Performance Indicator. This study is one of the attempts to apply AHP technique with non-profit organization and government infrastructure, which are encountering the difficult decision-making in fast-pace and more complex environment. Two airports pavement, which are Portland Cement Concrete (PCC) runway under the responsibility of Royal Thai Air Force are selected to be sample areas.

A Web-Based Application to Support Quality Management Documentation System for a Construction Company

Since the emergence of ISO 9000 standards in 1987, it has been widely known and accepted by various organizations, mainly because ISO 9000 provides clearly documentation and systematic procedures and instruction that can be followed by everyone in organizations. Therefore, the most important benefit is a better management control on entirely organization system, greater awareness of procedural problems and promotion value (Tsim et al., 2002).

Although organizations already certified ISO 9000, documentations are still obvious in its difficulty. Since the concept of ISO 9000 focuses on the continual improvement of the system, some documentation need to be accurately and regularly revised and globally updated whenever changes are released. The major problem can usually be found in the companies where several site works in a various distance space are in operation. Sometime employees follow the “right” procedure from a “wrong” revision that can lead to inefficiency of Quality Management System within organization.

Organizations have should realized the importance of ISO 9000 standards, particularly in Quality System Documentation. The quality plan, another type of the Quality System Documentation is also very important for productivity of construction organizations. The quality plan is established to meet each project requirement. It may consist of several documentations including some parts of quality manuals and procedures, contract requirement, and specifically project procedures and work instruction.

By using Web-based technology, the organization can ensure that all employees can instantly access, validate, and retrieve all documentations. Moreover, the traceability of document can be easily implemented. This, of course, will certainly result in paperless work flow, faster exchange of information, and better documentary control.

Mr. Noppadol Kaewborisut made a study aimed to develop a Quality Management Documentation System (QMDS) application for supporting Quality Management System within construction organizations. The output of his study will enhance and facilitate organization to manage documentation more efficiently and also enhance the accessibility and speed in handling with entire Quality System Documentation. In order to achieve his main objective, sub objectives were defined as follows:

1. To investigate and study the mechanism of Quality Management System, ISO 9000 standard, in Construction Companies.
2. To develop a framework of Quality Management Documentation System.
3. To develop the prototype of Quality Management Documentation System for supporting Construction Company’s ISO 9000 operational processes.

Conclusion

The study has proved that the Quality Management Documentation System (QMDS) is a development tool to support operational processes of ISO 9000 standard, especially in a construction company. It is the process specially designed to deal with all documentation management in the organization like the one in the construction company which faces with complicated lines of procedures containing a lot of documentation, and concerning with different parties and activities. Therefore, the details of the study has gone into dept verification which resulted in the conclusion that the QMDS application can be an effective tool for a Construction Company to meet with the increasing demand of world market competition both in quality and quantify of productivity.

1. Quality Management System, ISO 9000 Standards, in Construction Companies

The standards of ISO 9000 are written a manual guideline for a general purpose rather than for any particular business. They interpret, to some extent, what sorts of accomplishment rather than specify how things must be done. It is, therefore, to be cited here that, the ISO 9000 standards are varied in their nature and details from each Construction Company to another. This is because Construction Companies are different in specific types of documentations, management performance, organizational culture and levels of employees’ educational background but on the same basis, the ISO 9000 standards should definitely provide three procedure modules as minimum requirements such as follows:

a. Documenting procedure is the major operation of ISO 9000 within scope of this thesis. This procedure deals effectively with all types of the Quality System Documentation generated from the head office and the project site. These documentations specify the authorization with qualified employee to manipulate which only specific qualified employee can manipulate (create, update, validate) with. The authorization in the Construction Company, therefore are set to look after their type of documentation already specified. The Quality team is responsible for a Quality Manual which provides the whole picture of the Quality Management System of a company. Department managers should be responsible for the Quality Procedure and Work Instruction, the content of which is related to their work. For a Quality Plan, it is established in order to reach the project objectives that construction department have be full responsibility to deal with. In addition, standard forms and records, which can generate from any activities, are also considered as Quality System Documentation and need to be organized properly.

b. In the ISO 9000 standard, an auditing procedure is also required. Its purpose is to inspect a Quality System whether the established documentations are effective and employees conform to such documentation. There are two types of audits: an internal audit and an external audit. An internal audit requires qualified employees to perform as an auditor to audit across different department in a specific period of time. They should have some basic knowledge on departmental operation so that they can use their expertise in bringing out the accurate and reliable inspection. The frequency of internal audit depends on how many problems at that department or direct requests from specific department are. However, they should perform their function at least twice a year for internal audit. Regarding the external audit, it is generally hire from the third party by the company. This third party must have qualification and experience in auditing according to the minimum requirement of ISO 9000 standard. The frequency of external audit also holds at least twice a year. After finishing the audit in each period, the audit reports are submitted to the authority incidental to the contents of the report. Such reports are reviewed for final and make a decision whether the established documentations need to be adjusted accordingly.

c. Measuring procedure purposes to verify the Quality System of a company whether specific operational processes, equipments, or activities can perform at acceptable level or according to established objective. Each employee can acknowledge from his/her occupied documentation that measurement of activities or equipment will be carried out as defined in initially in the documentation. For example, project team has to check whether materials from supplier are correct to theirs specification. The results of measurements are collected as records and have to be kept properly.

2. A Framework of Quality Management Documentation System

After accomplishing the first objective, the overall information (both from literature review and company investigation) are analyzed and conceptually put into the framework of QMDS application. Such framework demonstrates the relationship among essential parts of effective development in the system. There are three main parts of QMDS application such as:

a. The document database refers to electronic files of documentation that are stored systematically in a document center by a file system. There are various types of Quality System Documentation in the electronic files of QMDS application such as Quality Manual, Quality Procedure, Work Instruction, Quality Plan, Standard Form and Document Template. All of these files use Relational Database Management System, being classified by type of documentation and stored in separated tables. Some tables have their inter-relationship as referred by unique keys. The document database is vital. It can indicate the efficient or inefficient result of the running system.

b. The security system is introduced in the QMDS application to secure all documentation stored in database by allowing authorized users to access and operate therein. Security system is vital part for QMDS application due to all documentation stores at server side. QMDS application has set two levels of security system. The first level checks authorization at the first time when users access to the system. They must input accurate username and password for access. The second level then checks authorization of users whenever they want to access to each Web pages. Users can manipulate (review, insert, update, validate, discussion room, and mailing list) with documentation based on their authorization which defined initially by the authority. This security system must be ensured that QMDS application is reliable and can be adopted safely.

c. Document functions refer to all functions of QMDS application. These functions are aimed to support ISO 9000 operational processes which can be divided into three groups: Document Manipulation, Document Distribution, and Document Discussion and Survey. Document Manipulation is designed on the criteria relate to all functions originated form documentation such as searching, reviewing, downloading/uploading, inserting, updating, and validating. The Document Distribution is focused on how to distribute effectively available documentation to relevant employees. Finally, Document Discussion and Survey enhances users to express their opinion by submitting the feedback and discussion. Moreover, poll is used to survey user’s opinion on how such documentation is working efficiently.

3. Quality Management Documentation System (QMDS) for Supporting a Construction Company’s ISO 9000 Operational Processes

For the processes to develop QMDS application, the traditional approach of the system development is adopted. Because of there are some environmental restriction and limitation hidden behind such as the involvement of users, time constraint, and natural operation of Quality System Management, the QMDS application, therefore develops new processes which need to be carried out starting from System Requirement Identification, System Design and Development to System Testing.

System Requirement Identification

This is the initial phase in the development of the system. It consists of two steps for implementation: Requirement Acquisition and Requirement Analysis. The Requirement Acquisition purposes to investigate the overview of ISO 9000 standard in order to identify the frequent problems and significant areas. The semi-structure interview is introduced towards respondents of Construction Companies to acquire their information about the operational processes of ISO 9000 standard. This useful information then served as the input to Requirement Analysis. This step defined the main objective of QMDS application by focusing on the document procedure of ISO 9000 operational processes. Such objective is the systematic management of documentation which can reduce valuable resource use.

System Design

The System Design describes how to design the whole system of QMDS application in order to reach the main objectives of the application. The design has been in-depth classified for the studied into three: Information Requirement and Design, Technology Requirement, and Structure Design.

System Development

This phase, System Development, is carried out with the designed system accordingly. It starts from the creation of database processes in order to support the other functions as well. MySQL is the application in the development of the database at the server side. This database can interact directly with overall functions by using HTML, PHP script and SQL command. Moreover, Java script is also adopted to program some complicated functions. These programming languages are programmed together in the Web page which concerns the compatibility and effective functions.
Other approaches in the System Development are Security system and user interface. PHP provides the function “session” that can be applied to define the authorizations of users. This can protect the unauthorized users to access and get confidential information of the company. For user interface, HTML provides various tags and attributes for developing the structure of Web page and linked menu powerfully. The Internet technology gives advantage to click and link quickly and easily to whatever Web pages. The overall Web programming languages now are developed to succeed and make successfully the prototype of QMDS application.

System Testing

The system testing is the approach for the uses to examining the accomplishment of the developed prototype. The application is tested by using the concept of the System Verification and the System Validation. First concept wants to check an effective function performance. Each function is tested step by step at the actual remote server. Moreover, the feasibilities of malfunctions are also tested to some functions so that any errors behind are corrected immediately. The second concept tests the usefulness of QMDS application in order to support the actual ISO 9000 operational processes. The practitioners of Construction Companies are interviewed to suggest/recommend on the application and the feasible improvement. For this study, the result of interviewing indicates that the developed prototype of QMDS application is useful and can support document procedure of ISO 9000 standard at acceptable level.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

Construction companies must sustain and grow in a competitive market. Companies consider a better business processes to ensure that employees have adequate information to carry out their work. One of many methods can be used to ensure the consistency of business process is Quality Management System. Quality System Standard, ISO 9000, is set up to control the processes and operations which influence to the quality of product. The major requirement of ISO 9000 needs the company to establish Quality System Documentation that refers to all information in each business process. When the documentations are properly managed, they will be improved the Quality System which lead to increased quality of product, company image, and customer satisfaction.

This study uses Web-based approach for managing Quality System Documentations. Quality Management Documentation System (QMDS) is introduced in order to support ISO 9000 operational processes, particularly in document procedure. MySQL and PHP are adopted to develop the system. The benefits from this application provide all users to access and deal with the documentations regardless of time or distance space, reduction of time used in manual operation, and an increased efficiency of document management.

Motivation of Construction Engineers in Yunnan, China

Construction has been perceived as a pillar industry in China’s economic revitalization (Han et al, 2001). Rapid economic expansion in China has resulted high volumes of construction activity. In the period 1990~1998, the strong construction industry and the rapidly growing construction industry were concentrated along the coast of China, but Han et al (2001) stated the construction industry contributed a higher proportion of GDP in the western and central provinces than the coastal provinces.

Yunnan province, as one of the above western provinces, has been developing at an amazing speed since 1980, especially during 1995~1998. Because Yunnan province shares a border of 4,060 km with Myanmar in the west, Laos in the south, and Vietnam in the southeast, accession to the World Trade Organization helped this province to draw considerable attention to its development of International Passageway connecting the South-Western China with South-Eastern Asia and South Asia.

After 2002, the government emphasized the development of inland regions by means of trickle-down economic growth from the coastal provinces and the improvement of urbanization. These development policies as well as the development of International Passageway provide a historic chance for the development of construction industry in Yunnan province.
However, it is also a challenge to the construction industry in Yunnan province to seize this opportunity of development. Generally, as Chen (1998) observed, the construction industry in China faces serious challenges and will require deeper reforms to address the remaining problem areas. He also indicated that construction management is still considered to be a serious problem in China. On the other hand, the government is keen to secure improvement in the performance of the construction industry through competitive bidding, management efficiency, training, increased labour productivity, quality control, advanced technology and great enterprise autonomy and accountability (Chen, 1998). That means the construction industry in Yunnan province has to deepen its reforms to achieve its goals under the government’s guide.

Effective motivation programs are considered as an approach to motivate employees toward organizational goals. On the other hand, unawareness of the motivation and performance of construction engineers will increase the difficulty of establishing effective motivation programs, which are based on understanding the behaviour of engineers. In other words, construction engineer motivation affects project productivity considerably so that researches on engineer motivation are required. However, in the construction industry, researchers commonly concentrate on the motivation of workers but ignore that of engineers.

Therefore, the study of engineer motivation is called for to facilitate the efficient use of engineers as project specialists. Especially, for project managers, the significant effect of engineers as team members deserves more consideration on “how to motivate them effectively” when project teamwork has become more and more important for construction productivity. Moreover, the study of engineer motivation might contribute to the effective motivation policies and programs which have been emphasized in China’s construction industry reforms.

Miss Dai Jiliang made a study to investigate the motivation of construction engineers in Yunnan province, China. Her three objectives were to: (1) explore construction engineers’ needs and their satisfaction on the corresponding needs; (2) determine the validity of the expectancy theory of engineer motivation, performance and satisfaction; and (3) address some recommendations for the methods applied to motivating construction engineers.

Conclusion

Below are the three important conclusions drawn from the findings of the study.

1. The exploration of construction engineer needs and their satisfaction on the corresponding needs not only illustrates the less satisfied engineers, but also facilitates more effective motivation policies such as the physiological needs and safety needs could be emphasized by the management to enhance satisfaction.

2. The validity of expectancy theory is not strongly supported by this study. But expectancy theory still provides a conceptual base for understanding the motivation of construction engineers in Yunnan province, China. The results of analysing the relationships predicted by expectancy theory imply that job clarify is useful to improve the expectancy of the engineers even though the expectancy has no strong relationship with effort and performance. Also, the results of analysis indicate that negative consequences of poor performance influence on effort more significantly than positive consequences for good performance do. The low motivation scores of the engineers suggest the present motivation policies might require improvement.

3. Job clarify could be achieved by the establishment and communication of clear performance goals. Negative consequence of poor performance might be considered by the management to influence effort expended by engineers. Important needs could be placed on the motivation agenda.

The result of this study implies that engineers’ general job satisfaction and intrinsic satisfaction are higher than satisfaction on the need factors. This means that engineers’ professions are attractive for them, but the outcome of work can not meet their needs successfully. The management might be in an external-internal embarrassment: decreasing profit margin caused by furious competition in the construction market and stagnant market-oriented reforms of the SOEs or myopia human resource management in the URCs and RCTs.

The Chinese government believes that the long-term development of the construction industry should still be centrally planned (Mayo et al, 1995). The goals of the official long-term plan include the performance of the Chinese construction industry’s output, productivity, construction quality, housing construction, employment, and international contracting (Zhong Guo, 1992).

Project-oriented organizations are encouraged by government so that the management of construction companies are inspired to adopt project-oriented work methods to achieve their goals in the construction market. Compared with traditional construction enterprises in China, project-based organizations allow project managers to make quicker and more responsible business decisions. Therefore, instead of being parent-government-unit-driven, project-based organizations are driven by market and more efficient.

Not only in the SOEs but also in the URCs and RCTs, project-oriented work methods will improve the competence of construction companies in terms of employees’ motivation. Firstly, in project-oriented organizations, motivation policies emphasize the direct relationship between project profit and individual income and welfare. The results of this study reveal that the physiological needs and safety needs were not met very well. Thus, the project-oriented compensation method will motivate engineers more effectively than other methods. Secondly, project-oriented motivation policies contribute to developing an effective workforce. The employees in smaller construction firms prefer a stable group to an ad-hoc one when they work as a team. Effective teamwork will attract engineers to cooperate with each other and maintain a solid group. On the other hand, in a manager’s view, training and development of workforce could be applied on this stable team-base. Hence, especially in the URCs and RCTs, the project-oriented human resource management could match the organizations’ long-term strategy exactly.

Her thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

Effective motivation programs are considered as an approach to motivate employees toward organizational goals. Construction engineers, as project specialists, influence construction productivity substantially. Therefore, it is necessary to explore their motivation. A survey was conducted in Yunnan province, China on the basis of expectancy theory of construction engineer motivation as well as their needs and satisfaction on the corresponding needs. The findings of their needs and satisfaction illustrated they were less satisfied; and the results based on expectancy theory indicated that the motivational climate is very poor. Considering the construction industry reform in China, the findings were discussed on the background of the characteristics of China’s construction industry to conform to its current status.

Public Project Financial Planning: The Asset-Based Approach For Vietnam Transport Infrastructure

Vietnam is integrating into the global economy with many changes. There has been an urgent need in developing its infrastructure. Investment in roads, bridges and terminals, along with measures to improve efficiency, will be essential for regional access and efficient freight movement to and from ports, industries and commercial establishment. Due to financial incapability, the country has to call for foreign investments as well as local investment.

Investment in infrastructure often has a very high return in Vietnam, as inadequate service levels and bottlenecks remain a serious constraint on development and competitiveness. Despite plentiful natural energy sources in gas, hydro and coal, per capita commercial energy consumption remains one of the lowest in the world. “It could be seen that while Vietnam could still maintain its advantage of a stable political environment and rather open policies on foreign capital ratios over the recent years, its disadvantages of poor infrastructure and administrative systems are not improved." (Source: Vietnam News Agency, 2004). The transport system – despite substantial improvements in the past five years - is still overstretched, adding to costs and preventing many upland and rural areas from sharing the benefits of Vietnam's growth. In view of the huge investment needs, high priority should be given to mobilizing private sector involvement as a ways to support for infrastructure.

Vietnam now is in urgent need to find new means to finance transportation capital investment, particularly public transit. It is very interested to find out how value capture can be applied in other developing country to achieve this goal. Walther et.al. (1991) argued that this added value, the direct result of public investment, should rightfully be returned to the public and should be recaptured to pay off the capital that was spent to build the project, rather than left for opportunistic speculators to reap private gain. Smith and Gihring (2003), from their annotated bibliography on the topic of value capture, pointed out that value capture offers a promising approach for funding future transportation development, for recovering operating and environmental costs. Since Vietnam is moving toward, it is the time to invest the current transport infrastrucutre financing and try to find a mean, by which the windfall gains felling to private landowners are recaptured, to finance a portion of the transportation infrastructure system.

Miss Nguyen Thi Cam Tu made a study which general goal is to study the applicability of public-private finacial approach, known as value capture method in form of financing infrastructure projects in Vietnam. Her specific objectives were as follows:

1. Analyze current financing approach for transport infrastructure projects in Hochiminh city in order to identify the need of improvement.
2. Examine applicability of the Value Capture Approach to finance Transportation Infrastructure in order to indicate its critical aspect in term of degree of suitability and acceptability.
3. Propose the practical direction and constrains if Value Capture Approach is applied for Transportation Infrastructure financing based on the analysis of finding.

Conclusion
To support Vietnam’s high level of economic growth, greater levels of investment are needed in the coming years to overcome a variety of real and looming infrastructure bottlenecks, such as in transport, capital construction. This will require massive new investment, which will need to come from the government, donors, multilateral development banks and private sources. In fact, it is likely that the private sector will have to play a role in funding new infrastructure investment in Vietnam.

1. Current Transport Infrastructure Financing
Most problems of current financing sources are “inadequacy in capital budgeting allocation”, “limited options for borrowing by contractors to bridge their expenditures and receipts” and “corporate financing problem”, consequently. These problems may be come from weakness of Vietnamese economic as well as political. Resources of various spending options are not allocated efficiently because these options are not compared impartially. In lower level, contractor meet difficulties facing with finding working capital financing from the only source interested-commercial banks due to complex loan structure and collateral requirements.

In order to overcome the current problems, there is an urgent need to develop Public-Private Partnership (PPPs). Both COs and GOs proposed that there must have been “the sufficient political and popular support for using PPPs”, need to “involve the appropriate private sector actors early in the process and discuss the following options with them, especially in sharing of risks and responsibilities” and “set up projects with clear ownership and management structures and division of responsibilities”. In addition, NGOs can be considered as glue for PPPs work. They are essential because of their knowledge of the local environment, both the public and private sectors, and because NGOs can continue to implement the outcome of the partnership work long after the partnership.

2. Value Capture approach
Value capture, being the new concept introduced, is just knowed by the Vietnamese proffesionals for recent 5 years. In the model of VC, Public sector-Government is considered as the key role for the success. If VC is successfully applied, not only the urban sprawl is reserved, but also land speculation is reduced. In addition, the success of VC can help procedural and technical efficiencies become possible within the existing land use right regime. An example is that market valuation formulas can be improved to more closely replicate shadow markets.

In the current financing situation like in Vietnam, respondents suggest that VC should be applied partly for specific appropriate infrastructure projects. Timeframe for applying VC are unclear for local professional officer, showing on different opinion. Taking majorities’ ideas, the research suggests 11 years for its application from firstly perception to final end. However, more studies and experiments are required to confirm this proposed timeframe. It is also need for drawing formal procedures to guide people how to apply it on local condition.

Recommendation
Vietnamese professional officers in general needed to be educated and trained smoothly for financing methods in order to qualify enough for applying and handling new financing methods effectively and efficiently. Moreover, the Government and the companies should consider properly people’s back ground, professional skill, experiences, ect. prior appointing candidates for positions related to financing.

1. Current Transport Infrastructure Financing
It is recommended that Government and local companies maintaining their focus on “BOT schemes”, “Traditional Public Contracting” and “Joint Ventures”. In addition, other methods such as “Service Contracts”, “Management Contracts”, “Concession or Franchisee Agreements” and “Lease Contracts” need also pay much attention on to satisfy the huge demand of capital investment for transport infrastructure development. On the whole, in order to be successful in attracting the private sector investment for infrastructure projects in different levels of involvement, Government has to improve the quality of the concession contract and of subsequent regulatory supervision.

In order o overcome the problems in financing, it is necessary for public finance amendment. This including efficiently reallocating the budget both for capital and recurrent expenditures with clear links between these. Programs proposed or defended as investments should be evaluated against the criterion of improving long-term economic capacity. For a successful banking relationship and adequate working capital support, the government contractor should seek a banking institution that has the expertise, experience, and a proven track record in the industry in providing the services and flexibility in financing that matches the company's specific needs. Such these things are difficult, but they are not impossible.

2. Value Capture approach
In summary, the demand for research on tax policies is critical in Vietnam. In order to accomplish that goal, it is neccessary to spend more time and commitment for training local proffesional. The training should be hold in the form of seminars, which offered an educational environment where instructors and participants could share basic principles on the taxation of real property and learn from each others' experiences.

In order to implement VC into Vietnam, it is critical that the land tax policies are implemented. The research proposes a land value increment tax to capture the capital gains from land transactions. To capture land value increments and avoid speculation, Vietnam instead implemented a capital gains tax system that covers both real property and other asset transactions. To discourage land speculation, the tax rate should be fixed at about 50 percent for property sales within two years of purchase, but owners who hold properties for more than two years will have a lower capital gains tax rate (based on the experiment of Korea).

Consisting with the constitutional principles of “People’s ownership” and “state management”, the principal amendment in land administration is in the need of execution with the interventions of some donors in some points represent areas, including shifting from treating “land use rights” as concessionary privileges to inalienable and universal rights-based land leases. Ideally, amendment should move gradually to absorb the informal land system into the formal system. This process should involve a careful study of informal practices and wherever possible use them as the template for the formal system. As land reforms elsewhere have demonstrated, where the informal system is treated as sub optimal and inappropriate, it has proved extremely resistant to change.

Her thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

In recent years, transportation and infrastructure needs in Vietnam have grown more rapidly than the available funding. This lead to the need for the government to design the legislation to encourage private-sector participation in the development, financing, operation and ownership of facilities. Therefore, the research focus on main issue of current financing methods applying for Vietnamese infrastructure in order to find the inefficiencies and shortcoming. In addition, the research also explore a new financing method, Value Capture approach, a device to recover for the public the increase in land value associated with public actions that otherwise would be captured by private entities. Through the survey made on 33 Company Officers and 23 Government Officers, who are expert on the field related to infrastructure financing, viewpoints of toward current transport infrastructure financing in Vietnam context were revealed. The descriptive statistic and hypothesis tests are used to analyze the collected data. The finding shows higher knowledge and application of traditional financing methods over new financing methods. The implication from that is the need of applying nontraditional approaches to finance infrastructure investment for Vietnam infrastructure development, especially transportation. This study also mentioned some problems and weaknesses in current financing and then discussed in detail some critical keys as motives for Public-Private Partnership- the solution for financing problems. Additionally, Value Capture is found very far from Vietnamese infrastructure financing as its knowledge and application very low even it may generate more benefit than current financing methods. In order to apply Value Capture in the current Vietnamese context, it is critical that the Vietnamese property tax policies and land law should be analyze and amended. Vietnamese Government needs to address this issue with big effort to set up the environment suitable for the development of new financing methods. Especially coordination with foreign partners is more over suggested to gain mutual benefits for both sides.

Construction Process Improvement for a Mass Housing Project: A Case of Pre-cast Housing Construction

Timely completion at minimum cost satisfying quality requirements and specifications is the main objective of any construction project. However, these achievements becomes much more crucial in case of housing projects, partly because of demand of the client, for selling a product in this competitive market, the houses should demonstrate sound quality as well as should be available in time. Residential projects are generally client driven constructions, the demand of client becomes more crucial in case of housing projects. Since the houses are being built on the expense of investors and developers, the retrieving of spent money is important to maintain the cash flow.

Ms. Pratigya Pradhan made a research which particular attempt was to tackle the common management dilemma of housing projects of a newly emerging company in Thailand i.e. to achieve its objective of timely completion of project with satisfactory quality to be offered to the client. The major management dilemma is that the project is failing to achieve the schedule target as demanded by client and buildings are suffering quality problems which cause low satisfaction of client and ultimately direct or indirect loss to the company. Project is behind the schedule and displaying low quality products.

The major objective of Ms. Pradhan’s thesis is identification of factors causing delay and quality degradation in projects and propose construction process improvement in order to improve the quality and shorten the schedule. In order to achieve the major objective, the following sub-objectives were formulated.

1. Identification of managerial delay factors, its frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality by assessing the perception of site personnel; Managers and foremen.

2. Conducting construction process diagnosis to study the work process and workers productivity, safety provisions during operations in order to identify the underlying operational factors causing delay and quality degradation in activities and their sequencing.

3. Finally, to propose construction process improvement in order to minimize the hindrances in achieving time and quality target.

Conclusion

The observation conclusions presented in this part, consists of summary from periodic observations and discussions and questionnaire survey with project manager, site engineers, foremen and quality control department including yard persons.

1. Identification of managerial delay factors (its frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality)

The managerial factors, defined as the factors affecting overall project performance, were finalized by the literature review and informal interview and enlisted in the questionnaire and ranked by site personnel broadly categorized as managers and foremen, from nine different sites of the same company. As per the data analysis i.e. observation of mean value and hypothesis testing for frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality as ranked by site personnel following conclusion can be drawn regarding problems affecting overall project.

a. Manpower Problem is the major problematic area which has greater impact on delay and quality of the project. It also includes four major problems such as: (a) lack of manpower, (b) crew absenteeism as the major one, (c) unskilled manpower and (d) lack of supervision as the other problems.

b. Material Problem is another major aspect of problem. The unavailability of material had major impact on delay, and problem in quality of material had greater impact on quality problem in the project. Both problems had high frequency of occurrence in the project. However, the major problem affecting the quality was ranked to be quality problem in material. The reason for late delivery of material was answered as a supplier fault due to high market demand; however the long procedure of the purchasing order from head office was complained

c. Problem in Co-ordination was ranked third problematic area as evident from structured questionnaire results. Problem between sub-contractors was basically occurring in one individual house between structure and finishing works. Problem in co-ordination rarely exist between the sub-contractors of activities of one group because each group i.e. structure and finishing were handled by one foreman so he normally handles the relating problems swiftly. However, the problem of co-ordination between the subcontractors of structure occurs with that of finishing. Normally due to carelessness of the structure workers, finishing workers have to suffer the problems such as holes, grooves and bolts left, uneven surfaces, creating problem in finishing work thus resulting to conflicts and delay in amending the faults and also quality problem in some cases such as leakage and smoothness in surface.

d. Problem in design was ranked to be moderately occurring in site. While inquired, the changes in specification of finishing works occurred moderately.

e. Financial Problem occurred moderately in the site, inadequate financial problem was ranked by foremen more than that of manager and cost overrun was ranked more by managers. When asked it was said that although the company do not much compromise in the financial supply, due to cost overrun on site, sometime there is inadequate supply to foremen level. Normally, subcontractors extend activities work to few days more, due to delay in payment. As per the direct labor (about 30%) hired in site result to more crew absenteeism than subcontractor as they only consider the daily payment and take less care of completion of the work since payment doesn’t depend upon work quality and completion.

f. Problem in equipment or shortage of equipment was rarely experienced. To reinforce the construction process and increase the target of accomplishment, equipment was readily supplied in the site with very few cases of damage and delay due to repair situation. Also evident from survey results the frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality due to this problem is quite low.

g. Problem due to site accidents were quite less. The safety checklists show the satisfactory condition of safety provision except in some cases like not enough scaffolding provision, carelessness of the workers especially in roof tiling. The frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality on project are quite low due to this problem.

In addition to observing the overall mean values of the attributes; frequency of occurrence, impact on delay and impact on quality, of a particular problem, the variation in view points of managers and foremen regarding a particular attribute of a problem was also compared. The comparison results shows that the significant difference in opinion was found in very few problems, in most of the cases slight difference in opinion was found.

3. Identification of Operational factors (Conducting construction process diagnosis to study the work process and workers productivity, safety provisions) in order to identify the underlying operational factors causing delay and quality degradation in activities and their sequencing

Major operational Problems in Activities

a. Structure works

For casting panels, the schedule for delivery is given to the yard by the site office before hand in order to get the material (pre-cast piles) on time. But the yard fail to meet this target, in such case sometime the stock pre-cast elements are also not enough and the schedule of that building is delayed.

The major delay was identified in installation of panels to set house, typically characterized by rejection of panels- 5%, panels not fitting – ( about 30% cases)and adjustment to be made on site showing low productivity material not ready- 2%, poor workmanship and crew absenteeism.

Other reasons of delay are late delivery of material from pre-cast yard and steel roof, unavailability of transportation for material and turnover. The cases of equipment damage are very rare.

b. Finishing Works

The major factors causing delay in finishing works is because of insufficient labor in major items like cement finishing and flooring, unavailability, late delivery or insufficient delivery of material, Poor workmanship of labor in sanitary fittings and painting;- major reason for disapproval by client. The reason for late delivery of material was answered as a supplier fault due to high market demand; however the long procedure of purchasing order from head office was also complained.

c. Work Sampling Results

As per the assessment of productivity of a gang work by several periodic observations the following facts were observed:

- The productivity rate of the group of workers were found to be varied by the type of work of activities, number of obstructions in construction process , time of the day and also from one group of worker to another group in same activity as well.

- The productive percentage is is high up to 50 % in early morning hours, diminishes after 2-3 hours ie need a sort of cigarette break and lowers down up to 20% productive percentage of labors in midday sun time and boosts up to 35 % in late hours.

- Certain gangs of workers are found to be more productive than other even for same construction activity. However, there is no solid system to compare progress to subcontractor level so as to compare or encourage them for productive works.

Whenever, there is some delay factors occurring there is direct impact on productivity as well, such as panels not fitting exactly, material not arriving at time, some person engaged in welding and next process has not started. So workers take cigarette breaks or a small nap until the problem is solved.


3. Construction Process Improvement

“Labor output is considered beyond control, other than the journeyman”, Picard 2003. Experience shows that the construction work process can be improved significantly by simply reducing or eliminating factors that interfere with crafts and technicians, and contribute to variability while diminishing the level of performance. As such after summarizing the major and minor delay factors underlying in the construction process, following recommendations are proposed.

a. Improvement in Managerial Aspects

- Proper planning of crew should be done before admitting considering the unavailability of labor in harvesting season.
- Enhance communication with head office especially for material ordering and change in design
- Strengthen quality control by increasing number of supervising staff.
- Since prefabrication is new technology for unskilled labor from farming based background.
- Proper provision of training the labor should be done.
- Change material to the available one
Some of the materials need special order that is ordering from abroad such as there is risk in ordering timely delivery as well as quality problem.
- Develop Penalty System to the supplier for late delivery

b. Improvement in Construction Process and on site Activities

Scheduling and work sequence

1. Presently, the prefabrication (2 days) and installation ( 3 days) of steel roofing are done serially after the set house. (Refer to Steel roofing, Table 2).Prefabrication of steel roof can be done previously before the set house is complete; this enables reduction of 2 days in critical path in structure works.

2. Since its clear from CPM of finishing works ( Chart1) that parqueting work (lying in the critical path) takes a significantly long time i.e. 10-15 days (3 days for installation and rest 80% of time in drying of the glue for parqueting works) which is almost 20-33% of overall schedule. Use of parqueting as a finishing work also needs to be re-evaluated, in order to shorten the schedule.

3. Proper co-ordination between site office and yard to ensure the casting. Increasing supervision in some of the activities such as set house and sanitary fitting is to be provided. Due attention should be drawn in casting schedule and quality of the panels to avoid breaking or rejection of panels which delays the setting house activity and the finishing works in

Productivity of Worker

- Increase the target in first four months of a year, so as to utilize labor availability.
- A motivation strategy can be developed to increase the efficiency of the labor on site such as comparisons of one gang work with another, incentive system and quality circle.

Conversion of cast in situ to pre-cast

- Footing for fence can be pre-cast.
- Outer door window frame can come with the pre-cast panels. The time taken to fill the gaps by mortar is reduced.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

Abstract

An important measure of success in the management of construction projects is the achievement of project within the prescribed time scale. Although the importance of time is realized, many projects fail to achieve them. Specially, in client driven projects like mass housing where maintaining quality and in schedule is the major issue, this challenge becomes more prominent.

The major objective of this thesis is to shorten the time and improve the quality in housing projects. The first step was to identify the factors causing delay and quality degradation. Structured questionnaire were administered in nine of the sites with same organizational systems and building types but varying in the scale. Fifteen problems grouped in seven categories of problematic areas were ranked from 36 respondents from Managerial level (including project managers and site engineers) and 54 respondents from foremen level. Each of the problems was ranked regarding frequency of occurrence, it impact on delay and impact on quality on the project. Two hypotheses were formulated to detect the perception of a particular problem in delay of a project and quality problem in the project considering the difference in perception of managers and foremen.

In order to detect the operational problems regarding detail sequence of works and other detail problems during the construction, construction process diagnosis was performed for detail activities for a particular building type (most commonly constructed) in a selected site having greatest investments among the sites. These basically include the process and sequence study of work along with the time study, labor and equipment information were collected for each of the activities. During the study observations reinforced by informal interview, observations were made in order to determine the major and minor delay factors. Further, work sampling of the selected activities of work packages, were performed for four different period of time of a day i.e. early morning, late morning, afternoon and evening, the number of samples being collected in average 340 activities and 930 for overall construction scenario.

The results showed that the most problematic issues affecting delay as well as quality degradation were problem in manpower and that in material. Problem in co-ordination and finance also had moderate impact on the delay and quality degradation of the project.
Finally, suggestions for construction process improvement were proposed in terms of management level and improvement on construction process and on-site activities and their sequencing.

Development of a Prediction Model and Prioritization of the Expressway Maintenance Management System

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) established the guideline of inspection and maintenance management system for the expressway system of Thailand since 1994 (JICA, 1994). However, ETA did not implement the inspection and maintenance system during that period due to limited resources. The Expressway inspection and maintenance section of ETA started to implement only the inspection database system since 1999 by following the JICA guideline.

Preserving the Expressway condition to be at serviceable level is one of the main responsibilities of ETA. Previously, Expressway in Thailand was maintained, but not managed with future planning of maintenance. Expressway Management System (EMS) could be introduced by using both the concept of Pavement Management System (PMS) and Bridge Management System (BMS).

ETA has been performing the maintenance policy by when need basis. To develop an effective expressway management system ETA should have future maintenance plan. The prediction model is needed for future maintenance policy. The ETA needs to set the minimum acceptable level of the expressway condition to determine the time when the maintenance should be performed. Especially while resources are scarce, it is more crucial that the prediction of deterioration must be effective to propose the most appropriate plan of maintenance alternatives. Also it needs to be prioritized of deteriorated expressway sections to maximize the available resources.

Pavement management activities must consider the factors that influence costs of maintenance, in addition to the performance improvement of the expressway system. The major costs of each alternative treatment includes i) cost of the actual work (materials, transport, placement, etc.), ii) vehicle operating costs (VOC), iii) cost of user delays (including extra vehicle operating costs during maintenance), iv) accident cost due to traffic hazards or interruptions associated with the maintenance, v) Environmental damages (Air or water pollution, noise, etc) and these costs are calculated in the present worth value (Haas et al., 1994). When a maintenance strategy is selected for a section in a year, the marginal cost effectiveness is calculated for the other candidate sections for ranking the candidate sections in each year with budget limitation.

Mr. Mohammad Shahidul Islam made a study which main objective of this study is to determine a maintenance prioritization policy based on the concept of single-year optimization for the Thailand Expressway System

However, his study focuses on the development of deterioration model of each expressway section. And on the prioritization of roadway sections by single-year optimization based on a heuristic, marginal cost effectiveness method. This technique for the prioritization of expressway sections is much simpler, flexible and operationally efficient, and provided results close enough to the actual optimization for all practical purposes (Haas et al., 1997).

·His secondary objectives were to: (1) determine the structural weight factors of the structural elements of the Expressway system; (2) determine the numerical condition ratings corresponding to the alphabetical damage ratings for developing the prediction model; (3) determine the Expressway Performance Index (EPI) for each section of the expressway system; (4) study the characteristics of each type of prediction models and determine the appropriate prediction model for Thailand Expressway System; and (5) determine the effectiveness of each treatment alternative for each expressway section and year combination.

Conclusions

In this study, the deterioration model has been developed for each section. An overall model has been also developed for each expressway system but for each route of the First Stage of Expressway system. The deterioration models have been developed by using the Expressway Performance Index (EPI), which considers the condition of elements together with the structural and functional importance by using the structural weight factors.

The structural weight factors have been developed from the ETA maintenance experts’ opinion based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). In the AHP, those weighting factors were used to develop the overall structural weight factors (W.F.), which comparison matrices had the consistency rating of 0.1 or less. It is concluded that the sub-structural elements for the bridge sections and pavement elements for the land sections have the greater importance than the other types of elements.

In addition to the questionnaire survey for structural weight factors, another questionnaire survey was performed on the ETA maintenance engineers for assigning a numerical value to the alphabetic condition ratings of the expressway elements, which have been practicing by ETA. Based on the average and the modal values, the used numerical condition ratings for ‘B’ and ‘C’ are 3 and 7 respectively. The lowest value for the worst condition and the highest value for the no damage condition were used as zero and 10 respectively (i.e. A=0 and D=10).

The model validation was performed based on the coefficient of determination (R2 Statistic) and the correlation test between the actual EPI and the predicted EPI for each expressway system and each route of the First Stage of Expressway system. It was found that the coefficient of determination (R2 Statistic) of each sectional model is close to one which is reasonably acceptable. It was also found that the overall model developed for the Ram-Indra Atnarong Expressway is the best, which coefficient of determination is 0.8113 and the Spearman’s correlation coefficient (rs) between actual EPI and predicted EPI is 0.939.

In the decision module, the single-year optimization based on the Marginal Cost Effectiveness (MCE) single-year optimization has been performed to select the expressway sections for maintenance with a limited budget. In this study 100 Million THB per year was used as the maintenance budget which is the average yearly maintenance budget of the Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand (ETA). All the maintenance methods were grouped into five maintenance packages for the maintenance decision analysis. These are 1) do nothing, 2) preventive maintenance, 3) minor corrective maintenance, 4) major corrective maintenance and 5) replacement of deteriorated elements. The effectiveness of each combination of section, maintenance alternative and the implementation year was calculated by using the respective sectional model. However, the overall model of the corresponding expressway system was used for those sections which were eliminated by the data manipulation and filtration process from the model development.

The MCE prioritization result shows that 661 sections of the total 506 candidate sections in each year would be maintained within the 5-year programming period with a limited budget. The average annual maintenance budget of the Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand (ETA) is 100 Million THB. The annual effectiveness has been increased with year as the needs of candidate sections increases. The cost-effectiveness ratio (CE) has been also increased, in the first year of the programming period the CE is 0.0312 and the CE has been increased to 0.1745 at the fifth year. The total effectiveness would be achieved by maintaining the 661 candidate sections with the four maintenance options is 52,162,235 with the total cost of 499,760,000.00 THB and the total cost-effectiveness ratio (CE) is the 0.1044.

From the MCE prioritization result, it can be concluded that the preventive maintenance and the minor corrective maintenance are the more cost-effective than the others for the early stage of the programming period. However, for the late stage of the programming period, the major corrective maintenance and the rehabilitation are the more cost-effective than the first two maintenance options.

His thesis abstract is copied and posted.

ABSTRACT

Maintenance management system plays an important role for infrastructures after the infrastructure facilities are constructed. The expressway system is one of the infrastructures that provides road network for road users in Thailand. An expressway road will not last for an extended period of time without application of some type of maintenance, rehabilitation, or reconstruction. Expressway Maintenance Management System (EMMS) is a process for maintaining and preserving expressway at a certain level of performance in the most cost-effective manner. The future plan for maintenance of expressway system is highly affected by the future condition and the budget allocation of the Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand (ETA).

Due to several constraints such as budget, time, manpower, equipment and other resources, it is not possible for the agency to maintain all the road sections or structural components that require maintenance within the same time period. In such cases, prioritization has to be set on which sections or components of the expressway system are to be repaired, what maintenance policy will be applied and when the repairs should be done. The prioritization of expressway sections and selection of maintenance alternatives should be such that the available resource utilization can be maximized.

In this research, the structural weight factors (W.F.) have been developed for each element of the expressway system. The structural weight factors have been developed based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process. The numerical condition ratings have been also developed for each alphabetical damage rating of the expressway elements, which have been practicing by ETA for the inspection process.
In this research, the prediction models for each 200-meter section of the expressway systems have been developed in order to develop an effective Expressway Maintenance Management System (EMMS). The single-year prioritization of the expressway sections and selection of maintenance options has been done based on the Marginal Cost-Effectiveness (MCE) for the five year programming period.