During the last few decades, there has been a greater understanding of the role of lean construction (LC) in achieving better management of construction projects and enabling the application of the fourth industrial revolution in the construction industry (Construction 4.0), which in turn, has the potential to improve the practices and outcomes in the construction industry. This paper aims to identify the barriers to adopt LC practices by taking a case of the Kingdom of Jordan. A questionnaire that included 30 barriers that were resulted from a comprehensive literature review was distributed and filled by 326 respondents from the Jordanian construction industry. The findings showed that the absence of support from the top management, low awareness toward LC, lack of training, and the absence of transparency are amongst the most serious factors that hinder the adoption of LC. The findings in this paper might be helpful to improve the knowledge about LC and support the adoption of new techniques that might improve the performance in the construction industry.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and theoretically explain the general barriers to adopting lean construction practices in the construction industry regardless of the country or the company size or specialization, and to suggest future research studies in this field. Design/methodology/approach: Systematic literature review was conducted to identify and explain the list of the barriers from scientific sources that were published before May 2018. Findings: Twenty-nine barriers were identified and explained, and a proposed model to classify the sources of the barriers was chosen. Seventeen barriers were classified as internal environment-related barriers, five were labor-related, three were materials-related and four were exogenous barriers. In addition, some directions for the future research studies were suggested. Research limitations/implications: The barriers that are related to the advanced levels of lean construction (LC) implementations, to a specific location or to a specific LC tool were excluded. Originality/value: This review will help to increase the understanding of the new concept of LC and might help to encourage the adoption of LC practices. Also, it might be useful for identifying the strategies to achieve successful application of these practices.

Improper understanding of complexity can be a leading factor in the failure of construction projects. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the complexity of construction projects. For this purpose, this study uses the systematic literature review (SLR) approach to review the related literature and propose a definition for complexity and the criteria that affect the degree of complexity in construction. The results of analyzing 49 studies from the literature showed that, generally, complexity is understood in three ways: the meaning of the word “complexity”, system and organizational complexity, and project complexity. Within these three types of definitions, it was found that “interdependency” and “multiple parts/parties” are the most frequently used keywords. The results also showed that another look at the current lingual definition of complexity is needed. Regarding the criteria, the results showed that the “number of stakeholders”, “scope and project objectives”, and “management structure” are the most important criteria to assess construction project complexity. Accordingly, this study provides a set of recommendations and strategies to help manage complexity in construction projects.

Satisfaction is a very important factor in improving productivity and performance in the work environment. This study aims to investigate the levels of occupants’ satisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in the governmental buildings in the Kingdom of Bahrain and to investigate the impact of occupants’ demographics and building attributes (non-IEQ factors) on these levels. For these purposes, the study used a questionnaire that has 17 indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors in addition to a group of non-IEQ factors. The questionnaire was distributed by hand or using email to 279 employees in the Bahraini governmental sector. The findings of the study revealed that occupants in the Bahraini governmental buildings are not strongly satisfied with IEQ factors, especially with sound privacy, followed by visual privacy and amount of space, and then noise levels. The findings also showed that for most IEQ factors, men are more satisfied than women are, those who work in enclosed private offices are more satisfied than those who work in open-plan offices, and those who have central air-conditioning at their workplace are more than those who have a wall-mounted air conditioner. The impact of age, nature of work, duration of working in the current building and at the current workstation, weekly working hours, and proximity to the window were also investigated. Accordingly, a group of recommendations was suggested aiming to improve the levels of occupants’ satisfaction.

The intensity and rate of construction operations require logistics and transportation that can adapt to the changing nature of activities on a day-to-day basis of construction. That enables rapid decision-making. This study aims to present the development of a platform to track and localize materials on construction sites. The platform integrates Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology system with Global Positioning System (GPS) for this purpose. The study also reports the use of the platform in a construction project. The results showed that the platform helps achieve improvements related to cost reduction and time saving while managing materials orders. The developed platform allows contractors and construction managers to get real-time information about the status of the materials and better manage the workflow in the project. The study contributes to the existing knowledge and presents a real example of resources management using smart tools in construction projects.

This study aims to investigate the level of the conformance of the practices of the second-grade contractors with lean construction principles. This study adopted the descriptive and quantitative design by using a questionnaire to investigate collect data. Seventy-two respondents from the second-grade contracting companies in Jordan participated in the study. The results showed that the conformance of the practices of these companies with the principles of lean construction was less than 65%. Also, the study showed that amongst the principles of lean, customer focus was the most applied in these companies, and showed that these companies lack the culture of providing training and empowerment to their employees and the culture of continuous improvement. This study will help to expand the knowledge about the lean construction application in Jordan, and to investigate the level of the application of this philosophy in different types of projects and different sizes of companies. The results of the study might be applicable in similar environments to Jordan.