Productivity Enhancement of Construction Industry using Prefabrication

Prefabrication of building components could be leveraged to improve reported low productivity trend in construction industry. Despite numerous known benefits of prefabrication, uptake of this technology has been discouragingly low. A nation-wide survey of consultants, contractors, employers and manufacturers was carried out in New Zealand and the received feedback was analysed. The subcomponents of the broad constraint categories and their relative levels of impact on the uptake of the technology were reported. Additionally measures for improving the uptake of the technology in construction industry were suggested. For a methodical evaluation of the marginal value achievable by the use of prefabrication variant over and above that of the traditional stick-built system at the design and life-cycle phases of the procurement process, a decision support model was developed and tested using the modular variant of the prefabrication compared to the traditional stick-built system. Results shows that use of modular variant of the prefabrication delivers superior value to clients compared to the traditional system at the development, operational and life-cycle phases of procurement process.