Aminah Md Yusof

A Conceptual Study of Key Barriers in Construction Project Coordination

The complexity of the nature of construction makes it one of the most adverse businesses that has ever existed. Construction projects have often suffered from high fragmentation, large waste, poor productivity, cost and time overruns, and conflicts and disputes for a long time. Thus, many new and innovative management and procurement systems in construction are introduced such as partnering, joint venture, alliances, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), just in time (JIT), and total quality management (TQM) to meet these challenges. However, these construction management and procurement systems are meaningless without coordination, a vital managerial principle and activity, which provides the best cooperation among team members. Although coordination plays crucial functions throughout the building process especially during the design and construction stages, some failures in construction projects adopting coordination principles are still observed. Hence, a study is carried out to investigate the key barriers of coordination in construction project. Through the literature review, five groups of key barriers are established in this paper, including the nature of construction, traditional contractual arrangement, construction participants, characteristic of organization and construction management approach. The investigation of these key barriers is expected to assist the construction players in coordinating their projects towards a better implementation of the innovative management and procurement systems. Lastly, worthwhile new research topics are suggested by this paper in developing the coordination key performance indicator (KPI) and critical success factor on construction project for further studies.

Indigenous land rights and dynamics of the land market in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract This paper raises a number of important issues relating to legal and economic development concepts. It concentrates on the supply constraints affecting land development decisions of both private and public landowners in releasing land for development purposes. With reference to the indigenous land rights in Kuala Lumpur, this paper focuses on the restrictions in interest, which may limit the land from being transferred in the open market. With a limited market, the indigenous land achieves a lower value in the market place because transactions are limited within a particular group of people only. As a result, the market forces are restricted and the land development process for urban regeneration often comes to a halt. In examining the role of the indigenous land market in the redevelopment process of Kuala Lumpur, the study uses an institutional analysis to show the way in which these restrictions in interest affect landowners’ decisions and, thus, restrict the supply of land to real estate redevelopment. In conclusion, the paper shows various causes for land supply constraints and ways to improve these with the aim to undertake urban redevelopment initiatives considering pressure for more land in the market.

Cause and Impact of Dispute and Delay the Closing of Final Account in Malaysia Construction Industry

Construction industry is realizing the plans and specifications for the physical structure. The project is success when it is completed to meet customer needs without any issues and problems in terms of time, quality and budget allocation. The budget allocation is important especially to get the total final cost of the project that will be added in the final accounts. Final account is the fact that the sum agreed to be paid at the end of the contract by the owner to the contractor. Moreover, the final account issue has existed in Malaysia construction industry for several decades in which the important factors significantly affect the closing of final account that related with contractor, management and the contract as well. Successful closing is categorized as resolved at the stipulated time without any problems in the dispute and delay. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the important factors that contribute to the closing of final account in construction projects in Malaysia. This aim can be achieved through the objectives of evaluating the contract in Malaysia to compare the final closure of various forms of contract and finally identify the causes and effects of the dispute and delays in the final account closing. As a result, this paper can assist construction industry players to create more effective planning and be used as guidelines in ensuring the on-time closing of final account in constructions projects in Malaysia.

Public construction projects performance in Malaysia

The Malaysian Government remains as the largest client in the construction industry. The government project or public project focusses mostly on the development of the basic infrastructure such as roads, dams, irrigation works, schools, houses, factories and other physical foundations on which development effort is poured in establishing the living standard of the public. Although a large allocation of national budget is used in the public development, some public projects are reported sick due to poor management. There are 235 sick projects discovered in 2011, 191 sick projects in 2013. The decrease of 20 percent in sick projects corresponds to increasing public construction budget from MYR504.5 billion to MYR550.6 billion in 2013. The Malaysian National Budget 2015 has allocated MYR770 billion in public projects, the results are hitherto unidentified. Abstract

Exploring Success Factors of Social Infrastructure Projects in Malaysia

In the context of construction management, Social Infrastructure Projects (SIPs) have long been overlooked. However, SIPs are one of the main criteria for enhancing economic productivity. This paper analyses the results of a survey aiming to develop a framework for SIP success factors to enhance the likelihood of success in the provision of SIPs in Malaysia. The principal component analysis reduces a set of 41 project success factors to six dimensions based on the idea of the project life cycle, i.e., the preconstruction factor, the construction factor and post-construction factor, and three internal factors: the organizational factor, the information management factor, and the change management factor. Understanding these success factors could be crucial in managing SIPs, since it will allow project stakeholders to take precautionary steps to identify foreseeable problems and areas for improvement. This will increase the success rate of the project and could even help avoid problems completely.

Multiple regressions in analysing house price variations

An application of rigorous statistical analysis in aiding investment decision making gains momentum in the United States of America as well as the United Kingdom. Nonetheless in Malaysia the responses from the local academician are rather slow and the rate is even slower as far as the practitioners are concern. This paper illustrates how Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) and its extension, Hedonic Regression Analysis been used in explaining price variation for selected houses in Malaysia. Each attribute that theoretically identified as price determinant is priced and the perceived contribution of each is explicitly shown. The paper demonstrates how the statistical analysis is capable of analyzing property investment by considering multiple determinants. The consideration of various characteristics which is more rigorous enables better investment decision making.

Stereotyping in Graduate Education: An Insight of Women's Participation in Malaysia

An equal access to the higher education in terms of gender has been successfully promoted in Malaysia. An increasing number of women succeeded in having secured places and graduating from local private and public universities in this country. This shows that more and more women have gone through higher education, and a significant number of them are now holding high posts both in the private and the public sectors. This is the result of various government policies n human capital development. Consequently, the previously ‘denied’ right of women to higher education because of gender is now a history in this country and more women are pursuing graduate education. This paper attempts to analyze an involvement of women in higher education in Malaysia with particular reference to graduate study in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The study shows an increasing interest and access to programs related to sciences and technical field by women, as opposed to the art and education which were previously associated with women. This trend signals a positive development of women’s involvement in higher education in preparing knowledgeable human resources to the nation, and thus provides a strong support to the women empowering strategy in Malaysia.

Building information modeling in construction conflict management

Dispute is recognized as critical cause of deficiency and low performance in construction projects. Plenty of studies have been done in construction dispute management recently; however, there are no studies on construction dispute elimination. This study aims to propose a building information modeling (BIM) approach to control conflict causes before the occurrence of dispute. BIM is one of the latest platforms that promote a high level of collaboration, information sharing, and coordination where its implementation ranges from project initialization to completion stage. The circumstances associating with BIM technology can be utilized to explore the possibilities in conflict and dispute resolution system. Questionnaire surveys are used to collect the primary data. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and multi attribute utility technique (MAUT) are adopted to develop an algorithm and a decision-making framework to manage and resolve the potential conflict causes, particularly for the Malaysian construction industry. Data analysis emerged that five critical conflict factors in Malaysian construction industry are insufficient monitoring of CPM scheduling and updates requirements; failures to understand and correctly bid or price the works; delay in running bill payment; inadequate contractors’ management, supervision, and coordination; and error and omission in design that are originated from time, cost, quality, and documentation. Further analysis to prioritize BIM functions in construction conflict management has been done by the combination of AHP and MAUT results. Consequently, it is affirmed that clash detection and cost estimating, 4D scheduling, 3D visualization and structure analysis as BIM functions obtained the highest score to control conflicting factors.

Sem approach: reclassifying housing delay in Malaysian housing industry

 Abstract—This paper sets out to study, define and reclassify delay in housing delivery system in Malaysia. In the recent years, the issues of delay related to housing and its development are gradually increasing in particular the housing project in Malaysia although the traditional delay factors have been applied to tackle this problem. Therefore, there is a strong need to reorganized and reclassified the delay factors in order to find an effective resolution and way out to solve the problems. This research was carried out through both primary and secondary sources. Triangulation approach has been utilized, in which quantitative method is used to collect data whereas qualitative method is essential to be used for data validation. Based on the data collected, a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) model has been form, showing the relationship of structural delay, institutional delay and cultural delay in relation to housing delivery. From the study conducted, it is found that institutional delay is the major contributor to housing delay in Malaysia. Through the data validation of housing delay index, the study concluded that the Malaysian housing industry is currently experiencing moderate delay. The results from this study would help construction practitioners, developer, consultants, contractors, policy makers, and researchers to have a deep understanding on the delays factors caused in construction process so that proper mitigation measures could be taken place.

Effectiveness of Pavement Management System and its Effects to the Closing of Final Account in Construction Project in Malaysia

Federal roads maintenance needs a systematic and effective mechanism to ensure that the roads are in good condition and provide comfort to the road user. In implementing effective maintenance, budget is main the factor limiting this endeavor. Thus Public Works Department (PWD) Malaysia used Highway Development and Management (HDM-4) System to help the management of PWD Malaysia in determining the location and length of the road to be repaired according to the priority based on its analysis. For that purpose, PWD Malaysia has applied Pavement Management System (PMS) which utilizes HDM-4 as the analysis engine to conduct technical and economic analysis in generating annual work programs for pavement maintenance. As a result, a lot of feedback and comment have been received from Supervisory and Roads Maintenance Unit (UPPJ) Zonal on the accuracy of the system output and problems that arise in the closing of final account. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to evaluate current system accuracy in terms of generating the annual work program for periodic pavement maintenance, to identify factors contributing to the system inaccuracy in selecting the location and length of roads that require for treatment and to propose improvement measures for the system accuracy. The factors affecting the closing of final account caused by result received from the pavement management system are also defined. The scope of this paper is on the existing HDM-4 System which cover four states specifically Perlis, Selangor, Kelantan and Johor which is analysed via the work program output data for the purpose of evaluating the system accuracy. The method used in this paper includes case study, interview, discussion and analysis of the HDM-4 System output data. This paper has identified work history not updated and the analysis is not using the current data as factors contributing to the system accuracy. From the result of this paper, it is found that HDM-4s system accuracy used by PWD Malaysia attains average 65 per cent only and had not achieved level that had been set by PWD Malaysia namely 80 per cent. Hence, this paper has revealed the causes of the occurrances in the pavement management system in construction project in Malaysia and investigated the consequences of the late payments and final account problems confronted by contractors in Malaysia, which eventually proposed strategic actions that could be taken by the contractors in securing their payments.