Impact of Critical Delay Factors on Project Cost Overrun in Offshore Fabrication in Nigeria: A Case Study

Cost overruns are major problems that face fabrication industry in Nigeria and can lead to numerous negative effects such as project delay, abandonment, and poorquality delivery. This research focuses on evaluating various factors responsible for delay impact on the cost of fabrication processes in fabrication industries. It involves the use of stochastic methods in the acquiring of relevant data. The effect of time overrun on completion cost of construction project was evaluated using regression analysis, carried out on MS Excel and MATLAB. Significant factors that contributed to cost overrun were change order, change in drawing, material/fabrication delay, design development, and change in specifications. The significant factors are the severe factors that are responsible for delay, which impacts negatively on the financial status of fabrication industries. The result showed that, out of the six critical delay factors (the predictors), only three were statistically significant upon the dependent variable (cost overrun), as they showed a p-value less than the alpha(α) level of .05. It was observed that most of these delays had high level of occurrence and were attributed to lapses on the company owners and contractors utilized for projects. This research provides a basis for oil and gas fabrication companies to reduce frequent time overrun of the critical delay factors caused by clients, consultants and contractors through monitoring and controlling them to keep cost overrun at bay.