Effective Material Management In Building Construction Site

The cost of construction material in a construction project may range from 30 – 80 % of total construction cost making it a prime uncertainty in a construction project. The main aim of this research paper is to examine the current material management practice and its impact on the delivery of building construction projects.  

A questionnaire survey administered to a purposive sample of 20 main contractors and 20 sub-contractors, eliciting current material management practices through semi structured interview and obtaining their perception root causes of ineffective material management toward 34 causes that were extracted from an extensive literature review. Moreover the relationship between different material management practices and project delivery in terms of cost overrun and delay were acquired from this questionnaire.

The study found 3 distinguish material management practices that were followed. The top 3 most common root causes of ineffective material management identified were matching price to competitor’s price, time spent investigating non-qualified suppliers and unavailability of material. Moreover the findings indicated that material management practices that are depending on the limited local supplier shops suffered worst delay problems while material management practices that relied on phase-byphase delivery experienced severe cost overrun. This research was conducted on building construction projects and similar research needs to be conducted in other types of construction projects to cross-reference and validate the result more widely.