Productivity In Construction Industry

679 Words2 Pages

1.1 General
Construction labour productivity has become big problem in construction industry. In many countries, labour cost comprises 30 to 50% of the overall project’s cost (Yates and Guhathakurta, 1993), and thus is regarded as a true reflection of the economic success. Because construction is labour-intensive industry, significance of this effect not only justifies the concern over its labour productivity, but it can also be argued that labour power is the only productive resource.

There are many challenges that are faced by construction industry in India, but one of the important challenges is labour productivity in construction. Every project has some difficulty in construction like material, money, tools and local contractor’s construction cost.

Productivity is not equivalent to performance. Many workers perform strenuously but have low productivity due to ineffective methods. The productivity may be high, however, with low performance, due to automatic machinery, which paces the work.

1.2 Motivation
Productivity is the key to the survival and growth of any organisation, industry or nation. Well-known Construction Company like L&T, have reported productivity issues. Some factors constrain the achievement of the set project objectives in the building and construction industry and are responsible for the reported steady decline of the productivity and performance. Thus resulting in time and cost overruns.

Most of the papers focus on the factors affecting productivity. They all discuss about the most important factor affecting labour productivity. Less stress is given to change in methodology of construction practises. In depth observations are required to find the faults in the ongoing practises and correct them. Also, di...

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...igned to establish the time for a qualified worker to carry out a specified job at a defined level of performance.”

a)Steps or Procedure Involved in Time Study
The detailed procedure for conducting the time study is shown in Fig. 1.3.

Fig 1.3: Time Study Procedure Flowchart

b) Allowances
The normal time taken by the labour to perform any operation does not contain any allowances. It is impossible to work throughout the day form morning till evening even though the most practicable and effective method has been developed. The job will demand the expenditure of human effort and some allowance must therefore be made for recovery from fatigue and for relaxation.

Allowances must also be given to enable the worker to attend to his/her personal needs. Following are the main types of allowances:
• Relaxation allowance
• Interference allowance
• Contingency allowance.

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