Research Center for Construction Innovation in relation to the Consulting Services at own risk. Construction Innovation expressly disclaims any liability or responsibility to any person in respect of any thing done or omitted to be done by any person provided on this Report or any information. This research aims to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of the construction and demolition waste and precast concrete supply chains through the development, trial and evaluation of an innovative public sector supply chain management strategy.
The study aims to meet the Brisbane City Council's (BCC) strategic objective to increase the content of recycled materials in construction projects through the expansion of the C&D waste sector through market diversification.
INTRODUCTION
As previously mentioned, public sector customers have the opportunity to create improvements in productivity and performance in various markets, including the C&DW and PCC sectors through supply chain management. It will specifically identify the difficulties associated with the implementation of public sector supply chain management policy within both sectors to improve practice.
CONSTRUCTION & DEMOLITION WASTE SECTOR
- Overview of C&D Waste sector
- Barriers & Drivers to effective waste management
- Waste management strategies
- Summary
Conflicting goals for the various participants within the construction environment in relation to the perceived importance of waste reduction (Teo, 2001; Hampson, yr). The uniqueness of each project, hostility and unpredictability of the production environment, fragmented nature of the project organizations used to procure buildings (Teo and Loosemore, 2001). As can be seen from the literature, most barriers to effective waste management revolve around the structural and behavioral characteristics of companies within the construction industry, where companies are very resistant in their behavior and attitude to new working methods and therefore do not embrace the potential benefits of effective waste management.
Much of this is caused by neglecting the significant role that human behavior and perceptions can play in initiating change. One of the biggest influences on firms' work practices is the set of firms they deal with on a daily basis; which are their customers, partners and suppliers. Firms are of the perception that it can be very dangerous not to change when working within such a competitive work environment that is the construction industry.
Lingard et al (2000) highlighted the importance of the perceptions held by individuals in the successful implementation of waste management strategies within construction firms. Contrary to the traditional view that the construction industry is fragmented, unstructured and unpredictable, London (2005) identified that the project-based industry has a deeper level of complexity in that there is an underlying structure to the activities of the supply chains, supplier. firms and procurement relationships, which can be classified based on specific patterns of characteristics. The next section will identify some key strategies that have been implemented to improve the environmental performance of the C&D waste sector.
PRE CAST CONCRETE SECTOR
- Overview of Precast Concrete sector
- Barriers to economic sustainability in the PCC sector
- Skill Shortage Strategies
- Summary
The industry's acute shortage of skilled labor and high operating cycles leading to the loss of skilled employees has led to the employment of unskilled workers in many areas within the industry, including the precast concrete sector. Therefore, the issue of skills shortages is speculated to be a key obstacle to the economic sustainability of the construction industry, including the precast concrete sector, and is a particularly urgent area that requires the attention of key players in the industry, including governments. According to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (2005), vacancies in building and construction accounted for 23% of all vacancies and 14% of all vacancies for skilled jobs in March 2005.
These skills shortages are not short-lived and are expected to persist due to the continued growth of the Australian construction industry (DEWR, 2005). This problem is not just specific to the Australian construction industry and appears to be a global trend. Globally, many policies, initiatives and programs have been developed over the past two decades to reduce the skills shortage in the construction sector.
Initiatives specific to the precast concrete sector appear to have been limited and therefore Figure 3.0 below has been expanded to map a selection of the key initiatives implemented by various players within the construction sector in response to the skills shortage in the past decade. Despite numerous initiatives and programs implemented in response to the skills shortage problem within the construction industry worldwide, as shown in Figure 3.0, the sector continues to face an acute skills shortage, which is negatively impacting the economic performance of the sector. More specifically, there is a lack of literature and industry commentary on the state of the precast concrete sector in Australia, and yet this is a very significant barrier to achieving this.
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
Supply Chain Management defined
PUBLIC POLICY: THEORY
Public policy defined
Therefore, government is a means to an end, which involves the appropriate selection of means and ends. However, this does not mean that government inaction is not politics – the deliberate choice of inaction over action consistently makes the course of action of doing nothing politics (Hedidenheimer, 1990; Dye, 1998). ; Fenna, 2004). In an economic market, governments do not always have full control over the market economy – the role of government extends only to their power to exert indirect influence through 'leverage' (eg tax structures, preferential spending and official interest rates).
Macroeconomics – deals with the performance of a country's economy as a whole (measured by the rate of economic growth and levels of unemployment and inflation). -economic – deals with the specific nature of the economic activity (the performance of industries and firms within industries). The government can therefore directly influence the performance of the construction industry by influencing consumer demand and more indirectly through manipulation of its fiscal and monetary policy (Hampson and Manley, 2001).
Public policy is dependent on its institutional context – it is essentially an expression of the government's political priorities. Therefore, an understanding of the nature of government and political dynamics is central to the study of the political process. The next section will review the Australian system of government to explain the operations of government and the institutional context for policy making.
The Australian system of government
Of higher relevance to the present study is the second dimension of microeconomics, which is the performance of industries, etc. concerns, why do some industries or firms prosper while others do not?). Within the construction industry, it has been suggested that government, at local, state and federal levels, can influence or influence the market to some extent by being a major construction sector customer as well as industry regulator.
Public policy process
The policy cycle used in Australia does not differ from the three-phase sequence found in other maps or models of the policy process in that it suggests that policies develop through a standard sequence of tasks, which can be framed as activities. The policy cycle provides the analytical tools to help make sense of policy making to pursue better practices. The policy agenda involves narrowing down this range of possible policy problems identified by the various actors to those few that are significant enough to command the resources of government.
As shown in the diagram, the political agenda is influenced by a mix of influential political, economic and bureaucratic elites. As Figure 6.0 shows, the issues that enter the debate on the political agenda and further require government attention are subject to both political and political elite influence. The rational comprehensive model is based on the assumption that policy problems are clear and that the policy process is one that is sequential and hierarchical in contrast to the complex process in real environments.
The incremental approach began as a critique of the rational comprehensive model through observations in real-world environments where ends and means in the policy process are rarely clear. The delegation transfers control of the political agenda to an external group (e.g. public inquiries, impact analysis). The interest in evaluating the political process is quite new and therefore not yet systematic (Bridgman 2004).
Summary: Key barriers to policy implementation
As a result, many existing public policies do not always go through the evaluation process to measure effectiveness, appropriateness, or effectiveness. This implies that policy processes are highly context-specific, as the development and implementation of new programs and practices must be adapted to the characteristics of the specific market. Furthermore, much of the management theory related to the implementation of practice or policy and implementation models are generated from abstract general principles that have not been tested or evaluated through empirical studies.
First, governments have their own goals and these may conflict with those of other governments, which may affect the successful implementation of policies. Policies developed by one level of government do not necessarily take into account the objectives of other levels. This often leads to conflicting instructions given to the agencies responsible for implementation, resulting in policies that do not achieve intended results.
Consequently, when political goals do not match their capacity, agency administrators tend to ignore official instructions to pursue personal policy preferences. Finally, government policy documents set out broad general principles that do not provide sufficient information to inform policy development and implementation in a specialized field. When policy goals are vague, agencies face problems as they cannot be sure of what is intended, leading to the implementation of policies that do not necessarily pursue the intended goals.
SUMMARY
