Productivity Analysis of Column Formwork Erection

The construction industry contributes a huge number of employments in India, but despite its economic importance and job creation, it faces challenges such as low productivity, project delays, and a lack of professional practices in the industry. A construction project’s time and cost performance are largely determined by productivity. Although, there have been research which focuses on general productivity, but there is no research done specifically for any particular component. Therefore, the present research work focuses on the productivity analysis of column erection activity, which will help the owners, project managers, and site engineers in proper planning, scheduling, and executing the project. Key parameters that hinder the column formwork erection are identified by preparing work breakdown structure (WBS) and identifying factors which lead to preparation of a questionnaire that includes 37 questions. The questionnaire is used to collect data of 97 ongoing construction projects of Gujarat state. The data is used to calculate relative importance index (Rii) value for severity and occurrence. As the ranking of reasons cannot be singly based either on severity or occurrence, a unique analysis is done by finding the cumulative value which is a function of both severity and occurrence to rank the reasons. The result reveals the major reasons that affects formwork erection activity are lack of finance, pandemic, availability of labors as well as skilled labors and improper planning and scheduling of formwork activities having relative importance index (Rii) value of 11, 9.18, 9.075, 8.69, and 6.96, respectively, and are discussed in this paper.