Improvement of Existing Public Office Buildings in Nigeria from Users’ Perspective Using Lean Thinking – A Pictorial View

Subject Areas : Urban Design

Adegbenga  Adeyemi ¹ (Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Environmental Technology, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, Nigeria.)
David  Martin ² (Professor, Faculty of Technology Management and Business, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Batu Pahat, 86400 Johor, Malaysia.)
Rozilah  Kasim ³ (Associate Professor, Faculty of Technology Management and Business, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Batu Pahat, 86400 Johor, Malaysia.)

Received: 2015-10-28 Accepted : 2016-04-04 Published : 2017-12-01

Keywords: Sustainable Improvement, User Requirement, Lean Thinking, Job Productivity, Design Features,

Abstract :

This paper gives a pictorial view of the relevance of lean thinking, particularly the applicationof muda as a supplement to the sustainable improvement diagnosis technique of existing public office buildings,for a fuller assessment of users’ requirement in Nigeria. The impact of perceived muda was related to the triplebottom line of sustainable development on perceived job productivity and design features and estimated from endusers’perspective, using diagnostic POE as data acquiring tool, while the confirmatory analysis was done throughAMOS, SPSS and MS Excel to explain the relationship between the different variables. The findings showed thatmuda is inherent in public office buildings and it has highly significant causal effects of 0.66 and 0.76 respectivelyon perceived job productivity and design features; it also has strong effect sizes of 44% and 58% in explaining boththeir variances respectively. The result revealed that users require more improvement in facilities as against spatialplan and structures, while there is a medium and positive correlation of 0.48 between perceived job productivity anddesign features implying that improvement in design features will consequently lead to improvement in perceivedjob productivity. The study concludes that lean thinking is relevant to building improvement and could serve as goodsupplement to the current improvement diagnosis of existing public office buildings, but not as a substitute sincedata were only collected from users who are not able to provide the required technical data that would otherwisewarrant use of equipment.

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