Usefulness of Adopting the last Planner System in the Construction Process of Addis Ababa Road Projects

Master's Thesis from the year 2022 in the subject Engineering - Civil Engineering, grade: 3.56, University of Gondar (Institute of Technology), language: English, abstract: Modern construction is characterized by its efficient utilization of construction resources to accomplish numerous construction activities without waste. But, Addis Ababa's Road construction projects fail to be executed on time, within the allocated budget, and with the desired quality. To solve this problem, a new management concept is introduced, namely lean construction. It is known to increase productivity and minimize waste. To realize this solution, last planner system (LPS) is used; it is one tool of lean construction. It is a person or group of people with the task to control the production unit. The main objective of this study is to assess usefulness of the last planner system implementation to advance the current construction process management in Addis Ababa city road projects. The research was conducted on selected asphalt road construction projects located in Addis Ababa city. To address the problems Questioners, observations, interviews, focus group discussion, and recently published journals were employed as a qualitative and quantitative data collection tools and analyzed using statistical package for the social science version 26 and super decision model version 3.2. The finding shows that; the construction management process adopted in all three sites is more or less similar they use a push planning system and critical path method to determine the duration following the master schedule but have no weekly work plan and lookahead schedule to forecast the coming week's duty. The LPS implementation expected barriers are also ranked from one to five: as Labor-related, internal working environment-related, stakeholders-related, exogenous related, and material related expected barriers respectively. The last planner system has many benefits as agreed by different scholar's those are time-related, Cost-related, claim-related, and quality-related benefits are the main benefits obtained through the LPS implementation and it is possible to conclude; LPS is useful for the road construction management system. The research is significant in creating awareness & understanding on the adoption of the lean construction tool (LPS) in sustainable construction, to improve knowledge and understanding of the implementation of LPS. Moreover, the LPS implementation conceptual framework was also developed based on the last planner system principles.