A Nigerian cased-based study of non-value adding activities and their reduction in concrete paver production

Abstract

Waste is responsible for certain production problems in construction. The negative impact of waste has spurned its reduction related studies. However, previous studies have not addressed the impact of waste on the production of concrete pavers in a factory. This paper thus reports on a case-based study that was conducted in selected concrete pavers’ (CPs) factories in Nigeria to investigate the various waste in the production process. Typical forms of waste that were discovered in the study are excessive procurement of materials, unnecessary delay, not meeting up with the daily production schedule and over curing of concrete pavers. The initial results calls for the adoption of lean practices that will reduce waste and improve production outputs in the factories. There is a major scope for the use of Kanban, JIT, and other lean tools in the case production settings.