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

Abstract

It is the consensus of scholars that the productivity of the construction industry is very low when compared with other industries. Concurrent Engineering (CE), which has a primary goal of reducing the total time from designing a product to releasing it into the market, while creating better designs as well, has been identified as one of the concepts that has yielded effective adaptation in the construction industry. An exploratory survey was used to identify 63 variables with the capacity to influence the uptake of Concurrent Engineering in Nigeria and was used to design a questionnaire, which was distributed to 50 stratified construction industry stakeholders. A statistical software package (STATISTI-XL) was used to analyse the severity index of each variable, in order to establish the importance of each variable in influencing the uptake of Concurrent engineering and also to compute the Kendall's coefficient of concordance, which assess the levels of agreement among the judges on the consistency of the rankings. A Kendall's coefficient of concordance of W=0.57365 was recorded. A lack of awareness emerged as the most important barrier against the integration of this concept into the Nigerian construction industry. The top five variables are all human factors that can be ameliorated by proper education.