Paul Kwabla Afatsawu
Akatsi College of Education
Email: paulbless2012@gmail.com
Abstract
The Ghanaian construction industry is (local contractors) are faced with severe construction materials management problems due to much uses of manual materials management processes in the industry. Mohammed and Stewart (2003) as cited in Sekou (2012, P.5) stated that the obvious contests of the Ghanaian construction industry today are that, majority of the construction process information and data continue to rely heavily on traditional means of documentation and communications such as face-to-face meetings and exchange of paper documents such as drawings, specifications and site instructions which seriously contribute to inefficiency in the materials management system. Anecdotal evidence suggests that majority of Ghanaian register contractors do not have the requisite knowledge as expected to undertake projects as well as how best to manage the materials supply chain to their site. Hence, Materials management processes are the greatest challenges that confront them. Tracking of materials issued becomes very difficult due to lack of systematic approaches and these allow room for materials theft, double-handling, luck of accurate specification, project delays, cost overrun just to mention but few. Onyegiri et al. (2011) granted that information and communication technology (ICT) can actually control project processes to put stop to some challenges in the construction works, like project delay, time overrun, cost overrun and most especially materials waste, theft and double-handling of materials. These will enable the project to be built and maintained. However, Enshassi, Mohammed, Mustafa and Myer (2007) assessed that researchers have not agreed on a universal set of factors with significant influence on labour productivity and no agreement has been reached on the classification of these factors. On the basis of this knowledge published in previous literature, main contributions were collected by Robles, Stifi, Jose and Ponz-Tienda (2014), determining a summary of factors affecting CLP in different countries with exception of Ghana.
Keywords: Materials Management Processes, Ghanaian Construction Industry, Critical Barriers to ICT Application & Labour Productivity
