Construction Labor Productivity: Determining the Optimum Values in Regard with Crew Size

Abstract

Labor results in about 50 to 60 percent of the total cost in any construction project and thus is an important factor to be considered in any construction. Labor productivity refers to the amount of work done by labor per unit hour in our research. Labor productivity is an important aspect to be considered since its importance lies in the fact that is controls our decision to deploy a certain crew size on a specific stage of construction to get optimum results. Firstly we avoid the cost over runs if we know the productivity since we would know the optimum productivity so we can thus optimize our costs aswell.secondly the labor productivity would help us overcome the time over runs in any stage of construction since we would know the optimum productivity so we would easily be able optimize the time required to carry out the stage of construction and thus eventually optimize the total duration of the project. We considered four major stages of construction in our study. Which were as follows 1. Concreting 2. Block masonry 3. Plaster 4. Paint We first carried out the literature review to find out the details and research already carried in this field. After that we made a data sheet which was used to record the data on the sites having variable crew sizes for the stages chosen by us. We recorded hourly data on the sites and this way we collected the entire data from the sites. We then plotted the curves of crew size against the productivity and found out the optimum productivity and the optimum crew sizes for all the stages of construction. We also developed a predictive model for each stage.