Analysis of User Problems in Construction Machinery Hiring

Analysis of User Problems in Construction Machinery Hiring D A R Dolage, W R G AWijesundara and D G Nandasiri In the years to come, the anticipated situations of low demand for large scale machinery and increasing demand for concreting machinery and equipment, road compacting plants and equipment etc. would necessitate hiring firms to be more organised to offer solutions to ensuing user problems. With the aid of interviews, the study identified 38 different problems facing the construction machinery users and these identified problems were later categorised into six generic types, relating to cost, availability, transport, machine operator, maintenance, hiring firm's responsibility and coordination. The n-rain contribution of the study is that it has identified the ten most important user problems by adopting the technique of Relative Importance Index (RII) on the responses obtained from 43 industry professionals. Also it has analysed the ten user problems in an effort to identify the causes and the solutions. The study also proposes remedial measures, in general, to alleviate the problems machinery users are facing.

D A R Dolage, W R G AWijesundara and D G Nandasiri In the years to come, the anticipated situations of low demand for large scale machinery and increasing demand for concreting machinery and equipment, road compacting plants and equipment etc. would necessitate hiring firms to be more organised to offer solutions to ensuing user problems. With the aid of interviews, the study identified 38 different problems facing the construction machinery users and these identified problems were later categorised into six generic types, relating to cost, availability, transport, machine operator, maintenance, hiring firm's responsibility and coordination. The n-rain contribution of the study is that it has identified the ten most important user problems by adopting the technique of Relative Importance Index (RII) on the responses obtained from 43 industry professionals. Also it has analysed the ten user problems in an effort to identify the causes and the solutions. The study also proposes remedial measures, in general, to alleviate the problems machinery users are facing.
Keywords: Earthmoving machinery, Construction machinery, Construction industry "1. Inhoduction It has been a long time since the construction machinery began to replace the use of labourers and animals. The use of machinery in construction industry has relatively a long history even in Sir Lanka. It is observed that the fleet of machinery currentiy deployed in the Sri Lankan construction industry is fairly old and susceptible to breakdown. Owing to reasons such as low exchange rate, high import levies, high freight costs, high insurance costs etc., it is aimost impossible to purchase new machinery. Only the state sector organisations are capable of purchasing new machinery due to their privileged position. The hiring firms, mostly, come to the possession of machinery either through the purchase of used machinery at state vehicle auctions or purchase of used imported machinery. The machinery imported by large scale foreign contractors engaged in hydro power and road construction projects had a practice to give them to the local contractors by way of loan settlement, at the conclusion of the projects. This is another source of machinery, available to hiring firms. As a result, the machinery in the possession of hiring firms are hackneyed and old which are susceptible to recurrent breakdowns.
However, the present trend is for such foreign contractors to take the used machinery back to their country. It seems that machinery hiring firms do not prevail as business units that are only engaged in hiring. The machine hirers are either construction contractors or machine importers/sellers. However, some owner operator hiring firms which solely depend on hiring can be found in the industry. The 20 machinery hiring units established by the National Housing Development Authority in order to increase machinery availability became defunct after a lapse of a few years.
There is a decreasing demand for large scale construction machinery specially for earth moving machinery. The reasons are the difficulty in transportation to the site and within the site, higher repair costs, higher fuel consumption, higher losses and wastages in handling and the decrease in the large scale projects. The objectives of this research study are (i) to identify the major user problems (ii) to assess the relative importance of these problems (iii) to make recommendations to mitigate the severity of problems encountered. This paper is organised as follows; Section 2 deals with the literature review on user problems of the construction machinery hiring; Section 3 illustrates the methodologv of the study; Section 4 provides the results, Section 5 presents the discussion and Section 6 deals with the recommendations.

Literature Review
The studies that have been conducted on various aspects of construction machinery in the local context are limited. In a pioneering study on 'Earth and Earth Moving Equipment', Mendis (1950) described rnachinery such as track laying tractor, bulldozer, carry-all scrapers, turnapulls, excavators, elevating graders and motor graders in the context of usage in major construction sites in Sri Lanka. The study shows how to use them in sites and demonstrates how to compute owning and operating costs. A later study by Pereira (1973), revealed that it is cheaper to use mobile conveyors than to use front-end loaders. The study also shows that they generate more employment. The study concludes that frontend loaders are not being put to the use for which they are designed and best suited and thus a drain on our scarce foreign exchange. A survey titled 'Standardisation of government heavy machinery, plants and road vehicles' was carried out in Sri Lanka in 1981 by Crown Agent of United Kingdom at the initiation of Ministry of Plan Implementation. The survey revealed different kinds of plant and equipment that belonged to 13 major public sector organisations.
Sivaloganathan (1984) advocates the rational maintenance of construction machinery which maximises the running time (hence minimise the downtime) and minimises the maintenance cost and investigate how to achieve this. Fernando (2002) in a recent study on 'Preventive maintenance: methods of preventing trouble', explored how the development of a comprehensive preventive maintenance program could benefit an organisation in multiple ways instead of adhoc maintenance methods often practiced in the industry. Based on a locally developed design, with the auspices of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Peradeniya, general purpose two-wheel tractors were produced in Sri Lanka (Ranathung a, 1977 The second part of the questionnaire focused on the respondent's assessment of the relative importance of user problems. The third part was to elicit any other problems encountered by the users not already addressed in the questionnaire. A five point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) was adopted to evaluate the importance of the user problems.
The data were obtained from a sample of construction professionals who either work in semi government organisations or private sector organisations. Due to the possible poor response for questionnaires, 43 personally known professionals were engaged in the questionnaire survey.
In addition to the 38 questions listed in the questionnaire/ a separate request was made to mention any other problems encountered by the machinery users.

Calculation of relative importance of user problems
Kometa et al. (1994) adopted the technique of Relative Importance Index (RII) to determine the relative importance of the various causes of the delays. The same technique was adopted in this study. The five-point scale that ranged from L (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) was adopted in order to evaluate the relative importance of user problems. The RII of each user problem was computed by adopting the following formula: RII where W is the weighting given to each factor by the respondents (ranging from 1 to 5), A is the highest weight (5 in this case) and N is the total number of respondents. It can be stated safely that the responses of the experienced professionals should be given a higher weighting than that of less experienced  values of RII ranged from 0 to 1 (0 not inclusive), the higher the value of RII, the more severe was the user problem as each question has been designed to evaluate the respondents' degree of agreement on problems that the machinery users are experiencing. The RII was used to rank the different user problems. These rankings made it possible to crosscompare the relative severity of the user problems as perceived by the respondents. The RII of each individual user problem was adopted to assess the general and overall rankings of each user problem.

Results
The summary of the characteristics of the respondents who participated in the questionnaire survey are presented in Table 2.
The primary data collected from the second part of the questionnaire, in relation to user problems was analysed. The average values for RII for the broad categories of user problems were computed and depicted in Table 4. The additional problems the respondents identified in the third part of the questionnaire are stated below: 1) The competition in the industry is below the desired optimum for users to be benefited by the competition.
2) The information in the possession of the hiring firm regarding the machine is not adequate.
3) A hiring firm does not have sufficient competent sta{f to advise the client on the selection of a suitable machine for a given task.
4) At the time the order is placed, a hiring firm is not certain as to which machine will be delivered to the user.
5) The terms and conditions imposed by a hiring firm regarding a machine are usualllr unfavourable to the users.
6) The site staff has no control over the administration and the discipline of operators.

Discussion
The first objective of the study was to identify the user problems of the construction machinery. A total of 38 user problems ware identified that was later classified under six relatively mutually exclusive groups. The second objective was to rank these user problems using the values of RII. In this section, the ten most important user problems that were identified based on the RII rankings (as shown in Table 3) are discussed. The ten most important user problems are given below: The machines in the possession of hirers are either bought at the auctions of government institutions or imported used machinery. The government institutions usually decide to sell machines through auctions only when they find that it is no longer economical to continue to use them with repairs. The imported second hand machines are usually around five years old. The users of these face difficulties since these machines being'domestic' models in the country of origin are fitted with highly sophisticated control devices for which neither spare parts nor the required technology to repair are locally available. Further, these devices can be susceptible to frequent breakdowns when handled in the incorrect r,r'ay and the ensuing repair costs are exorbitant. Furthermore, it is costly to rnodify the interfaces for manual control systems.

5.2
The hiring firms need to be pressurised to deliver the machine in time after an order has been placed It is observed that the majority of hiring firms do not have a designated person to deal with the custorners who expect to hire machines. Often when an order is placed with a staff member of the hiring firm, the same person is not available to answer when the 'irser is in contact with the firm to have the machine delivered to the site. As a result, a prospective user has to go to great trouble by way of additional calls and visits in order to pressurise the hiring firms to make the machine available.
A major reason for this situation is that authority has not been delegated adequately to a particular person who is likely to meet with the client, negotiate the deal and make the reservation in order to handle the delivery of the machine. Generally, with regard to the 'owner-operator' firms the situation is better as the owners themselves take part in accepting the order and in the discussion of how the machine will be delivered. Nonetheless, the users have to be wary about the following three aspects when dealing with 'owner-operator' firms: . Most of the hiring firms do not have a practice whereby the operators communicate with the hiring firm on a regular basis in order to intimate the progress of work and the condition of the machine. The maintenance staff have a tendency to provide improvised temporary solutions to breakdowns that occur towards the conclusion of a project. Usualiy, after the return, the machine is offered to the next client in the same condition without attending to the expected repair as anticipated. As a result, the machine is prone to breakdowr-r while it is in operation with the subsequent user.

5.4
The machine may not be delivered at all at the site particularly in situations where the hiring firm also undertakes conskuction work There is a trend among the hiring firms to undertake construction work themselves in order to maximise profits. The person from the hiring firm who accepts the order for a machine has no authority to stick to it when the higher authority decides to deploy the machine in their own project. A hiring firm can minimise this problem by informing the subsequent user about such an eventuality weil in advance in order for him to take mitigatory measures.
Further, when a contractor gets in touch with a hiring firm to order a machine there is a tendency among hiring firms to make an offer to do that part of the work as a subcontractor.

Vehicles available to transport machinery are limited in supply
In Sri Lanka, the machines currently being used are heavy and large, requiring large vehicles such as low-bed trailers to transport them from site to site. The low-bed trailers are in short suppiy and in most of the cases even if the machine is readv to be released it cannot be moved to the next site on account of not having a suitable vehicle to transport. This problem will become less serious in the future because the current trend is for small scale and minisize machinery such as D4, D40 dozers, mini excavators etc. for which special vehicles are not required for transportation and instead they can be transported in a typical truck or some machines in a farm tractor.

5.6
The keenness, the hiring firm showed at the time of negotiating and reserving the machine has regressed when the machine is delivered and in operation Mostly, the attitude of the hiring firms, when a client calls at or phones up to hire a machine, is to over-sell the machine in an effort to get the order. Usually, the firms are very keen to satisfy the customer in different aspects; speed of delivery, reliability of the ,.machine, performance of the machine, routine maintenance lequirements and fuei effi.ciency etc. Flo-wever, it is experienced that when the machine is in ser.rice, usually, the same enthusiasm would not prevail and the hiring firms are not ccmmitted to the initial prornises. In case of a cosily repair, there is a tendency for hiring firms io postoone the repair and instead they provide an imprcvised sciution which restricts its sccpe of appiication. to quote the originally rated output for their machinery. As a result, there is a tendency for the hiring firm to quote higher capacity regarding machines at the time the reservation is made for machinery. When the users of these machines find that the n-rachines are producing lower outputs they tend to make complaints to the hiring firm.

Conclusions and Recommendations
The study shows that the users are facing severe hardships as a result of several issues connected with the use of construction machinery. The ten most important reasons deemed to be the main causes of user probiems have been identified after a rigorous analysis. r A systematic procedure has to be followed by the user as well as the hiring firm in selecting the most appropriate machine in terms of size and type in order to execute the tasks economically.
. \A/hen a user is in contact with the hiring firm regarding a machine, it is beneficial to both parties to make a visit to the site in an effort to study the site condition. As a result, the most appropriate machine for the job and a favourable hire rate can be negotiated. Further, this helps to develop the commitment of the hiring firm to the task and to make him understand the urgency and the seriousness of the task.
The hiring firms need to provide a front office service with a person dedicated to liaise with the clienis from their first visit until the time the machine is handed over and to employ professionally qualified staff in order to provide the best possible solutions in the event of problems. Therefore, the criteria for registration of contractors by ICTAD should be revisited with respect to this aspect and steps need to be taken to promote hiring of idle machinery.
Some machinery sold at auctions are bought for their value in scrap metal.
Most of the time these machinery have expensive and rare spare parts that are still usable. It is recommended that registered hiring firms (or contractors) be given an opportunity to cannibalize spares and components prior to their disposal as scrap metals. This heips to bring down the maintenance cost of machinery, save foreign exchange and lower the hiring rates. The sellers of used spare parts have a practice of buying used machinery at auctions with the intention of cannibalizing.
However, they are wary about the high capital-tie up as parts cannot be sold immediately.
The piled-up machinery awaiting sale on the road-sides is evidence of the difficulty of the importers in affecting sales of these items. It is proposed that a study be carried out on the feasibility of importers leasing out such machinery on iong-term leases to the contractors with a buy-back guarantee at the end of the lease.