Leveraging Technology to Improve Construction Productivity

Advances in technology have many benefits. Among the most often cited are improved quality and productivity. The construction industry lags compared to most industries in regard to utilizing advances in technology. The opportunity to improve construction productivity exists, however, and evidence suggests that sectors of the construction industry have experienced long-term productivity growth as a result.

Significant value can be gained for construction if technology could be more effectively leveraged to improve productivity. Understanding how past technologies have improved construction productivity and demonstrating how new technologies can do the same will help CII member organizations identify emerging technologies that could improve productivity.

The primary objective of this research was to identify how technology has and can improve construction productivity. Since a multitude of factors simultaneously impact a project’s productivity including work force characteristics and management practices, it is difficult to isolate technology’s impact on productivity. Therefore, the research utilized an activity-based analysis in order to control the number of factors that influence productivity at the project level. Correlating changes in technology with changes in productivity through statistical analysis allowed the research team to identify the order of magnitude that different technological characteristics have had on construction productivity. Objectives and corresponding deliverables of this research are:

1. Characterize and quantify the impact (in orders of magnitude) that changes in equipment, material, and information technologies have had or can have on construction productivity.  
2. Develop a model that utilizes the research analyses to predict the potential impact of current and new construction technologies on productivity.  
3. Execute field testing of a technology (in this case, automated materials tracking and locating) to help validate the predictive model by incorporating characteristics of information technology’s impact on construction productivity.

In summary, this research project has demonstrated with significant statistical analysis, field trials, and tool development how technology can be used to leverage productivity.