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This study investigates the cost and time performance of highway projects from the viewpoint of the public owner. It differs from previous studies which focused on the contractor’s perspective on project performance. A total of 13 success factors were identified from literature and the opinions of experienced engineers. Data was collected from 99 projects handled by the Department of Highways (DOH) in Thailand Discriminant analysis was used in this study to build the cost and time predictive models, which were generated from samples of cases, which had already been grouped and known as successful and unsuccessful projects. The models were then applied to new cases with measurements for the predictor variables, to predict that the projects were either successful or unsuccessful. The results show that success in cost performance depends on the management of construction resources, budget management, construction method, and communication. By contrast, schedule management and human resource management inhibit cost performance. Success in time performance depends on choice of construction method, management of construction resources, schedule management, supervision and control, and communication. Quality management, budget management, human resource management, owner involvement, and team relationships impede time performance

Highway projects in India have a history of cost overruns and delay in project delivery, thus incurring huge losses to public funds. The study aimed to measure the extent of influence of various constraints on the overall success of highway projects (e.g. National highway project, state highway projects and major district roads). Based on the literature, various factors were grouped under three categories (a) Project Constraints, (b) Project Governance Constraints and (c) Stakeholder Induced Constraints.

A quantitative approach was adopted. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted with 435 respondents from the field of highway projects with a minimum experience of 1 year as Project Manager. The data was analyzed by partial least squares structural equation modeling technique.

It was identified that the impact of project constraints (ES = 0.313) on project success is more than that of project governance constraints (ES = 0.231) and stakeholder induced constraints. Additionally, it was found that project governance constraints have a strong impact on project constraints (ES = 0.535) and stakeholder induced constraints (ES = 0.403).

The study presented in this paper is first of its kind to measure and articulate the impact of project governance constraint, project constraint and stakeholder induced constraints on project success.

Modeling represents the art of translating problems from an application area into tractable mathematical formulations whose theoretical and numerical analysis provides insight, answers and guidance useful for the originating application. The purpose of this paper is to determine the causal causes of schedule overrun and cost escalation of highway projects in Egypt in order to be used as independents variables in mathematical models for predicting the percentages of schedule overrun and cost escalation of such projects in Egypt.

A survey of a randomly selected samples yielded responses from 40 owners, 15 consultants and 56 contractors. The survey includes 38 schedule overrun factors and 26 cost escalation factors. The effectiveness degree of the identified factors has been identified by the triangle fuzzy approach.

The results of the survey show that “contractor’s technical staff is insufficient and ineligible to accomplish the project” is the most important cause of schedule overrun, while the major cause of cost escalation is inadequate preparation of the project concerning planning and execution.

The main contribution of this study is predicting the percentages of schedule overrun and cost escalation of highway projects in Egypt. Through the application of the linear regression analysis method and statistical fuzzy theory, four predictive models have been developed and it has been noted that the linear regression-based model shows prediction accuracy better than statistical fuzzy-based model in predicting percentages of schedule overrun and cost escalation.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether there is a correlation between mobilization costs and project schedule performance of highway projects. In addition to this, the study will also determine if the mobilization costs are helping small or large highway projects in terms of improving the schedule performance.

The data of 206 highway projects were collected from the Department of Transportation of two states with the help of questionnaire survey. The cost, schedule and mobilization costs data were collected. The performance metrics related to construction schedule growth and construction intensity were developed in order to test the research hypotheses: mobilization costs will increase the schedule performance of highway projects. The data were also divided into two groups based on project cost and analyzed to check whether the mobilization costs impact the schedule performance of these highway projects. Spearman's correlation test was conducted to determine the correlation between dependent and independent variables. In addition, a Mann–Whitney test was conducted to determine the difference in medians of construction schedule growth and the construction intensity of these two groups of projects.

One major study finding was that there was no strong linear correlation between the mobilization cost percentage and the construction schedule growth and construction intensity of highway projects. However, the study found the projects that have 9% or more mobilization costs had significantly better schedule growth compared to the projects that have less than 9% mobilization costs. When data were analyzed based on the project size, it was found that this pattern was seen only in large projects costing equal to or more than $5 million.

This study's findings have very crucial practical implications to state DOTs contract engineers. This study shows that the highway contract engineers need to provide the right amount of mobilization costs to complete their projects on and before schedule. If the correct amount of mobilization costs is not provided to the contractors, the impact of these mobilization costs on reducing the schedule growth will be negligible. The findings of this study will assist public agency decision makers to complete their projects on or before time by including the mobilization costs provision in the contract. The state DOTs can improve their schedule performance by providing enough financial help to the contractors so that they can improve their cash flows and complete projects successfully within the given timeframe.

This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by validating the impact of mobilization costs on the schedule performance of highway projects. There has been no empirical study conducted prior to this to identify the role of mobilization costs on reducing the schedule growth of highway projects.

Infrastructure projects are complex, task-based endeavours; the reliability of project schedules is often low, as delays occur. As a result, the infrastructure sector is constantly searching for innovative practices that might improve project performance. This study aims to pursue one research question: what are the benefits and challenges to last planner system (LPS) implementation in Australia’s infrastructure industry? It addresses this question through an examination of two rail infrastructure projects in Victoria, Australia.

The state of Victoria in Australia provides an excellent context for this study. The study was set in one of the programme alliances which was contracted to carry out five level-crossing removal projects. This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, including surveys, interviews and site visits. The authors collected 43 valid survey responses. Additionally, 19 participants from the alliance programme’s two projects (Projects A and B) took part in the interviews. Extensive empirical evidence has been triangulated to achieve the research goals.

The findings show through the questionnaire survey that the greatest benefits that digital LPS brings are primarily associated with process improvement and social benefits. The interview results acknowledged that the roll-out of digital LPS had a positive impact on schedules, cost, occupational health and safety (OHS) and quality performance. The research also noted a few challenges in the introduction of digital LPS. Overall, the finding presents strong evidence that the introduction of digital LPS has been a clear success in the case company.

This is the first piece of research to fill this major gap in the LPS literature by exploring the issue of digital LPS adoption in Australia’s infrastructure sector. This study has thus laid the foundation for future work on LPS research in the Australian context. The authors are optimistic that this exploratory work will generate interest across other alliances, and perhaps extend into Australia’s construction sector.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that are equipped with numerous features and functionalities help to improve the profitability of construction corporations around the world through enhancing the efficiency of the functions related to cost management. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the applicability of ERP systems for cost management of building construction projects in Sri Lanka.

A qualitative technique was used in this study, which comprised two-round Delphi-based semistructured interviews. Purposive sampling was used to determine the interviewees. Content analysis was used to evaluate the collected data.

The findings of this study identified the ERP system as a strategic tool for gaining a competitive advantage for an organization while confirming 14 uses of ERP systems and 16 stages of the cost management process. Eighteen issues were finalized at the end of the interview rounds while categorizing the suitable ERP applications at each stage of the cost management process.

Even though there are numerous distinct studies conducted on cost management and ERP systems, there has been a lack of studies conducted on the synergy between these two areas that can be adapted for the building projects in the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, the findings of this study can bring a new paradigm to the Sri Lankan construction sector by influencing the adaption of correct ERP systems at numerous project stages by providing a competitive edge.

Challenges associated with ensuring the accuracy and reliability of cost estimation of highway construction bid items are of significant interest to state highway transportation agencies. Even with the existing research undertaken on the subject, the problem of inaccurate estimation of highway bid items still exists. This paper aims to assess the accuracy of the cost estimation methods employed in the selected studies to provide insights into how well they perform empirically. Additionally, this research seeks to identify, synthesize and assess the impact of the factors affecting highway unit prices because they affect the total cost of highway construction costs.

This paper systematically searched, selected and reviewed 105 papers from Scopus, Google Scholar, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Transportation Research Board (TRB) and Science Direct (SD) on conceptual cost estimation of highway bid items. This study used content and nonparametric statistical analyses to determine research trends, identify, categorize the factors influencing highway unit prices and assess the combined performance of conceptual cost prediction models.

Findings from the trend analysis showed that between 1983 and 2019 North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East contributed the most to improving highway cost estimation research. Aggregating the quantitative results and weighting the findings using each study's sample size revealed that the average error between the actual and the estimated project costs of Monte-Carlo simulation models (5.49%) performed better compared to the Bayesian model (5.95%), support vector machines (6.03%), case-based reasoning (11.69%), artificial neural networks (12.62%) and regression models (13.96%). This paper identified 41 factors and was grouped into three categories, namely: (1) factors relating to project characteristics; (2) organizational factors and (3) estimate factors based on the common classification used in the selected papers. The mean ranking analysis showed that most of the selected papers used project-specific factors more when estimating highway construction bid items than the other factors.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by analyzing and comparing the performance of highway cost estimation models, identifying and categorizing a comprehensive list of cost drivers to stimulate future studies in improving highway construction cost estimates.

Incentives are mechanisms used to create genuine opportunity for contracting parties to work together to achieve good results, rational returns and bear appropriate risks. The question of how to motivate the construction workforce rightly so as to achieve best performance has remained paramount to project owners. This paper aims to investigate on how to model for incentive payoffs in the Nigerian construction industry to effectively use the benefits of incentive mechanisms.

The collected data are analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics, such as frequency counts, charts and principal component analysis.

The findings reveal the metrics for measuring organisational incentive payoff and the scaling factor for each metric. The study further develops the employee incentive payoff models for both operational workers and management staff in the construction sector.

This study provides a practical solution to the application of incentive mechanisms in construction projects. The paper recommends the need for restructuring of incentive mechanisms to significantly impact on other performance criteria, therefore contributing to best performance in project delivery.

This study aims to adopt the Altman model in order to predict the performance of industrial companies listed on the Palestinian Stock Exchange during the period of time between 2013 and 2017.

The study sample consisted of 12 industrial companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange, and their financial disclosure period extended for 5 years. Multiple linear regression model was used in the analysis to determine the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable where the independent variables were (X₁, X₂, X₃). This study is based on one basic assumption, which is that the Altman's model cannot predict the performance of the Palestinian industrial sector.

The results of the analysis proved the negation of the zero main hypothesis. This means that Altman's model can predict the performance of the Palestinian industrial sector at the level of statistical significance (a = 0.05), as well as the existence of a statistically significant relationship between each of the independent variables (X₂, X₄, X₅) and the dependent variable (Log (Z-score)). Hence, the relationship of X₁ and X₃ with the dependent variable was not statistically significant.

This paper highlights different challenges that face the adaption of Atman's model and performance prediction in the Palestinian industrial sector. The findings of the analysis have the potential to help future researchers in examining and dealing with new challenges.

This paper presents a vital review of adopting Altman's model in the Palestinian industrial sector. A number of recommendations have been made, the most important of which is that most of the companies are located in the red zone. The Altman's model must be adapted in order to fit the Palestinian environment according to the results of statistical analysis and according to a proposed model, which is Log (Z) = −0.653 + 0.72X₂ + 0.18X₄ + 0.585X₅.

This paper aims to identify the success factors (SFs) for total quality management (TQM) implementation in automotive spare parts companies to improve their business performance. It also intends to rank these factors in a hierarchical structure in descending order of their criticality.

In this study, a significant number of automotive spare parts companies were extensively surveyed to ascertain the contributions made by various factors toward the successful deployment of TQM practices. The collective and individual evaluation and ranking of the SFs were determined using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach to develop the framework based on the prioritisation of the identified SFs.

The findings of the study show that five success factors, namely, internal environment, top management involvement, process management, supplier management and external environment, were ranked as critical factors with a total weight of 49.2%. Nine success factors, namely, employee training, teamwork, customer satisfaction, continuous improvement, communications, using new technologies, zero-defect processes, employee empowerment and benchmarking, were ranked as important with a total weight of 39.1%. The last five success factors, namely, strategic planning, quality policy, employee satisfaction, self-assessment and cost of quality, were ranked as minor factors with a total weight of 11.7%.

The current study adds to the existing body of knowledge for scholars and practitioners of TQM by specifically focusing on identifying and categorising the critical SFs for TQM implementation. The 19 categorised critical SFs have been used to construct a framework for TQM implementation in the Palestinian automotive spare parts companies. Such a framework would offer a comprehensive overview of the SFs, their categories, significance and priorities within a TQM environment in the automotive spare parts companies.