Title: Factors affecting pouring ready mix concrete production rate using tower cranes in Egypt

Authors: Emad El-Maghraby, Jan Frick, Christopher Irgens

Addresses: Department of Business School, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway. ' Department of Business School, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway. ' Strathclyde Institute for Operations Management, DMEM, University of Strathclyde, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow G1 1XJ, UK

Abstract: Poor productivity of construction industry is one of the causes of cost and time overruns in construction projects. The first stage to control this problem is to identify factors affecting productivity and analyse them in order to control their effect in productivity. In Egypt, construction productivity is influenced by several factors that vary from project to project as well as from task to task within the same project. The pouring of ready mixed concrete (PRMC) using tower cranes is the essential activity in contemporary construction and engineering projects especially in high-rise building projects. The obstacle here is that there are several factors affecting the production rate. Moreover, the accuracy of estimating this production rate is limited by the multi-variants nature of the problem. For this reason, the aim of this research is to identify factors affecting pouring concrete, and investigate how each of these factors| influences the production rate from a careful review of literature selected based on direct site observation. Therefore, the analysis and investigations of these factors should give the site managers, site engineers and project managers an advanced view for dealing with these factors in the future.

Keywords: productivity; production rate; concrete pouring; ready mix concrete; Egypt; construction industry; tower cranes; high-rise buildings.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2011.042954

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2011 Vol.3 No.4, pp.353 - 374

Published online: 29 Nov 2014 *

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