ASSESSMENT OF AWARENESS ANDADOPTION OF LEAN PRACTICES IN THENIGERIAN BUILDING INDUSTRY

The construction industry globally is faced with challenges of time overrun, cost overrun, and material wastage. In order to address these challenges, the lean production approach has been adopted in the building industry, which is a subset of the construction industry. Although several studies have examined various aspects of lean practices in the different countries, studies on the adoption of lean principles and practices in Nigeria are grossly underrepresented in the research literature. This study investigated the levels of awareness and adoption of 32 lean practices by firms in the Nigerian building industry. A questionnaire survey was conducted in five cities of Abuja, Enugu, Kaduna, Lagos, and Port-Harcourt in five geo-political zones of Nigeria. Totally, 446 participants drawn from architectural, building consulting and contracting and quantity-surveying firms in the five aforementioned cities provided the data for this research. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and the result shows that whereas around 67% of the respondents claimed that they are aware of lean practices in construction, about 47% of the firms have adopted one form of lean practices or the other. It was also observed that the three most adopted lean practices among the 32 investigated were Visual Design Construction (VDC), Total Quality Management (TQM) and Team Work/Partnering, respectively. This study implies that although there is a growing knowledge about lean practices among firms in the Nigerian building industry, the level of adoption of individual leans practices by the firms is generally low. Therefore, for the building industry to maximise the benefits of the lean production approach, appropriate steps need to be taken to ensure a critical mass uptake of lean practices by firms in this vital sector of the Nigerian economy.