Delay Analysis of Road Construction Projects using RII Method

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose and recommend a tool for contractors before the bidding stage to calculate the effect of delay in road construction projects by finding the relative importance index (RII) method. Through a rigorous literature search and interviews with road construction professionals, 95 delay causes were discovered and classified into 9 broad groups for this purpose. The relative importance index approach was used to calculate the relative relevance of delay factors and groups. The ranking of these factors and groups were illustrated in terms of their impact on delay. The factors and groups that are most and least responsible for the delays were explored.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Construction industry is the second vital economic sector after agriculture that plays crucial role in social and economic development of India. Construction industry plays an important character in the social, economic, and political development of a country. Construction projects are time bounded. Each project has destined duration with defined initiating and completion time. Poor cost management and overrun are the huge problems and a veritably serious issue when they come to project time and cost in both developed and developing countries. In many different construction projects, delays are prevalent and can result in significant losses for project participants. The construction industry has a veritably poor reputation for managing delays. Delay analysis is either ignored or carried out subjectively by simply adding a contingency. As a result, numerous major projects fail to meet schedule deadlines. In a road construction project where time truly equals money, the management of time becomes very critical (Duran, O. (2006)), thus predicting the likelihood of delay might play a key role towards project success (Luu, et al. (2009). Delay means non-completion of the project within the prescribed duration agreed on contract. According to Kaming (1997), delay is the extended time beyond planned completion dates by the contractors during the contract. Elinwa (2001) defined delay as the period between the agreed completion data and the actual data of completion. Trigunarsyah, B. (2004) identified that only 47% of the projects in Indonesia were completed on schedule, 15% before scheduled time, and 38% were delayed.

A. Need of the Study

In India, the road construction industry constitutes a very high percentage of the economy contract. Nevertheless, quite few studies have adopted the use of project management approaches to manage the delays. A significant factor which contributes to this problem is lack of application of project management approaches to tackle these delays. This has resulted in poor quality of works, loss of productivity, delayed projects’ completion, and increase of total cost of project, unemployment, liquidation of construction firms, disputes, and litigations.

???????B. Objectives

1. To identify the delay factors in road construction project.
2. To compute relative importance of delay factors as well as groups and demonstrate the ranking of factors and groups according to their importance level.
3. To address the most contributing factors and groups to cause delays.

II. REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Some theoretical and analytical investigations performed in this field are presented in the following literature survey.

1. A survey was conducted by El Razek (2008) to identify the main causes of delays in Egyptian construction projects as seen by the owners, consultants, and contractors. To fit the Egyptian construction sector, they divided the thirty-two (32) reasons of timetable delays into nine (9) types. These categories included funding, materials, contractual ties, adjustments, rules and regulations, personnel, scheduling and control, tools, and reasons relating to the environment. According to their findings, the biggest contributing factors were lack of professional construction/contractual management and the following: financing provided by the contractor during construction, delays in the owner paying the contractor, design changes made by the owner or consultant during the construction phase.
2. Wiguna, I.P.A. and Scott, S. (2005) examined the dangers of delays to building schedules in the Indonesian cities of Surabaya and Denpasar. The most important variables, according to their analysis, were: high inflation/increased material prices; client-driven design changes; poor design; weather conditions; late payments on contracts; and poor construction performance.
3. Odeh, A.M. (2002) conducted a survey to determine the major reasons for delays in traditional type building projects. They divided the reasons for delays into the following seven key categories: contract-related, client-related, consultant-related, material-related, labor-related, equipment-related, and external-related delay factors. The survey’s findings showed that the top ten (10) most critical reasons were interference, insufficient contractor experience, funding and payments, labour productivity, sluggish decision-making, poor planning, and subcontractors.
4. Frimpong, Y. et al. (2003) undertook a survey to determine the elements influencing cost and schedule overruns in groundwater development projects in Ghana. Twenty-six (26) elements that contributed to project schedule delays and expense overruns were evaluated and ranked. According to the study’s findings, problems with monthly contractor payments from agencies, poor contractor management, issues obtaining materials, subpar technical performance, and an increase in material costs are the primary reasons of schedule delays and cost overruns in groundwater project development.
5. Koushki, P.A. et al. (2005) undertook a survey into the construction schedule delays related to private residential developments in the state of Kuwait. They identified three (3) primary factors: order changes, owner financial limitations, and owners’ lack of expertise in the construction industry as the main reasons of timetable delays.
6. T. Subramani, P. S. Sruthi and M. Kavitha (2014) completed a research based on the Indian road construction projects. They discovered that the main contributing factors for the cost overruns of road construction projects in India were inadequate project formulation, poor field investigation, bad cost estimates, poor planning during execution stage, inadequate equipment supply plan, lack of project management during the stage of execution, insufficient working, changes in scope of work, and change in law and order.
7. Abdullah Alhomidan (2013) did an analysis based on the 41 primary causes of cost overruns in road projects and a survey to determine the elements that had the greatest influence. He concluded that the biggest influences on cost overrun were internal administrative issues, payment delays, poor communication among project partners, and delays in decision-making.
8. Ibrahim Mahamid (2013) performed study based on the 45 factors that might cause contractors in the West Bank of Palestine to postpone construction projects. He conducted a survey using a questionnaire and discovered that the main causes of time overruns in Palestine were the financial standing of the contractors, owner payment delays, the political climate and Western Bank’s segmentation, a lack of communication between the project’s parties, ineffective equipment, and intense bidding competition.
9. Eng. S. B. Wijekoon (2011) suggested doing study on the factors that most significantly affect cost overruns in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces. He developed a questionnaire based on 19 criteria, and a thorough national survey was conducted. He concluded that the primary reasons for cost overruns in Sri Lankan projects were difficulties with site acquisition, cost inflation, payment delays, delays in transferring existing utilities, and design revisions made during construction.
10. Han, S. and Dikmen, I. et al. (2007) created a framework to apply the proposed technique and offered a fuzzy risk assessment methodology to evaluate cost delay risk in building projects. They predicted that a total of twenty-three (23) risk variables originating at the project and national levels result in the danger of cost overruns. Their risk model indicated that there were nine (9) factors influencing nation risk and fourteen (14) elements generating project risk. A multinational construction business created a computer programme, and real company and project data was used to demonstrate the system’s applicability during risk assessment at the bidding stage.
11. Al-Momani, A. (2000) undertook a quantitative study of Jordan’s 130 public building projects’ construction schedule delays. According to the study’s findings, designers, user changes, weather, site circumstances, late delivery, economic situations, and increases in quantity are the primary reasons of timetable delays in building projects.
12. According to Dinesh Bhatia et al. (2016), delays in decision-making, shoddy time estimation of project tasks and activities, unforeseen circumstances, internal conflicts within the project team, poor work organisation and planning, and a lack of proactive action by any of the parties involved are the main factors and reasons behind schedule and cost overruns in the construction of residential projects.
13. Abd El-Razek et al. (2008) studied delays in building construction projects in Egypt. A total of 32 delay causes were chosen and categorised under 9 groups, including financing, manpower, changes, contractual relationships, environment, equipment, rules and regulations, materials, scheduling, and control, depending on who was responsible (contractor, consultant, owner, and common responsibility). A Likert scale with four categories- very important, important, somewhat important, and not important-was used to rate each delay reason. They concluded that the most significant contributing factors were: financing provided by the contractor during construction; delays in the owner's payment of the contractor; design modifications made by the owner or his agent during construction; partial payments made during construction; and a lack of use of professional construction/contractual management.
14. Research by Bent Flyvbjerg, et al. (2004) used a sample of 258 road and rail infrastructure projects with a total cost of US$90 billion. They concentrated on three main causes of cost overruns. They focused on variables including the size of the project, the form of project ownership, and the duration of the project execution phase. They discovered that the project’s size and longevity were the primary causes of cost overruns and associated hazards. They concluded that public ownership played a bigger role in the kind of ownership.
15. Rahman, Memon, and Karim (2013) sought to identify and categorise the critical factors that influence time and cost overruns in ground water projects. The components were divided into several groups. These groups were rated, and the order of significance of the elements was determined based on these rankings. These findings indicate that a variety of factors influence cost overruns in developing nations like Ghana. There are five key factors that have been agreed upon by the owners, contractors, and experts. They include frequent payment issues with agencies, poor contractor management, material procurement, subpar technical performance, and budget increases for material costs.

III. METHODOLOGY

This section introduces the methodology used in this study to accomplish the study’s objectives. Basically, this research work includes four different phases. First phase of research covers review of literatures. Second phase of research includes development of framework of collected data for the ranking of delay in road construction projects. Third phase of research includes analysis of collected data and discussion on the comparing the result of ranking by RII technique. Here, relative importance index (RII) is calculated for each cause by using 5 likert ranking scale based on the questionnaire survey obtained from respondents of different construction companies in India.

RII = ∑W / (A x N) ……………… (1)

Where, W = weights given to each factor by the respondents (ranges from 1 to 5 relating 1 as very less severe and 5 as very high severe), A = highest weight in the rating scale (i.e., 5 in this case) and N = total number of responses. Fourth phase of research covers conclusion and recommendation part.

The data obtained from different personnel survey consists a total of 123 samples/ responses were obtained from questionnaire survey. Out of these, 16 responses were received from Project Owner, 24 responses from Contractors, 30 responses from Project Managers, 39 responses from Project Engineers/ Site Engineers and 14 responses from Consultant/ Architect.

TABLE I shows tabular list of delay factors according to their related group and their respective RII along with ranking of the listed factors.

IV. RESULTS ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS

TABLE I shows tabular list of delay factors according to their related group and their respective RII along with ranking of the listed factors.

TABLE I List Of Delay Causes, Their Related Group, Rii And Ranking Of Each Factor

In TABLE I above, bold items show the top ten (10) delay factors from RII ranking and italic items represent the five (5) least critical delay factors.

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As we can see from TABLE I, based on its degree to affect pre-planned project duration and how it can make project delay, the highest recorded value of RII rank is “Land Acquisition”, “Late in approval design document by the owner” and “Delay in approving shop drawings and sample material” with RII of 0.74, 0.72 and 0.71 respectively. Following groups show the individual group-wise critical delay factors to look upon in future.

1. Material: The material related group of delay factors was the most important group to cause delays. This was mainly due to factors “Late procurement of construction materials (RII=0.66)”, “Late delivery of materials (RII=0.63)”, and “Escalation of material prices (RII=0.62)”.
2. Equipment: Second important group was the equipment related group, having the factors “Shortage of machinery and equipment (RII=0.70)”, “Low productivity of equipment (RII=0.54)”, and “Machinery/Equipment/Plant breakdown (RII=0.50)”.
3. Project Owner: After the equipment, the project owner related group of delay factors took place as the third most important group. The outstanding factors were “Land Acquisition (RII=0.74)”, “Late in approval design document by the owner (RII=0.71)”, and “Delay in approving shop drawings and sample material (RII=0.71)”.
4. External: Following the project owner, the external factors group of delay factors ranks as the fourth most important group. The noticeable factors were “Unfavorable weather conditions (RII=0.64)”, “Changes in government regulation and law (RII=0.60)”, and “Accidents during construction (RII=0.58)”.
5. Labor: Fifth important group was the labor related group. The prominent factors were “Labor strikes (RII=0.55)”, “Low productivity level of labor (RII=0.54)” and “Shortage of skilled labor (RII=0.49)”.
6. Contractor: After the labor, the contractor related group of delay factors took place as the sixth most important group. The outstanding factors were “Ineffective project planning and scheduling (RII=0.55)” and “Poor financial control on site (RII=0.53)”.
7. Consultants/Architects: Following the contractor, the consultant related group of delay factors ranked as the seventh most important group. The noticeable factors were “Delay in approving major changes in the scope of work by consultant (RII=0.56)”, “Inadequate experience of consultant (RII=0.44)”, and “Poor communication between consultant and others (RII=0.43)”.
8. Design: Eighth important group was the design related group. The prominent factors were “Complexity of project design (RII=0.53)” and “Design changes by owner or his agent during construction (RII=0.51)”.
9. Project: The project related group of delay factors was the last and the least important group. The noticeable factors were “Original contract duration is too short (RII=0.44)”, and “Complexity of project (project type, etc.) (RII=0.39)”.

Conclusion

The first objective was to identify the delay factors in road construction projects. Through detailed literature review and interview with experts from a leading Construction Companies, a total of ninety-five (95) delay factors were identified. The second objective was to quantify relative importances of delay factors and demonstrate the ranking of the factors and groups according to their importance level. Through interviews with a committee of specialists, this objective was accomplished. Using the calculated relative importance indices, all factors and groupings were sorted in order of importance/severity. According to these rankings, the most and the least significant factor and group was also accomplished. The third objective was to address the most contributing factors and groups to cause. This objective is shown above in Fig. 2 and below Fig. 2. The highest RII (0.519) for the groups was found as “Material related delay factors” and least RII (0.348) was for “Project related delay factors.” For each group, the three (3) most contributing factors to cause delay were presented.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2023 Himanshu Malunjkar, Madhura Aher. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.