Leveraging Technology to Improve Construction Productivity (ICP)

Project Manager: Ric Jackson, (301) 424-4202 or rjackson@fiatech.org

Project Leaders:
Carl Haas, P.E., Ph.D., (519) 888-4567 x5492 or chaas@civmail.uwaterloo.ca
Paul Goodrum, P.E., Ph.D., (859) 257-5416 or pgoodrum@engr.uky.edu
Carlos Caldas, Ph.D., (512) 471-6014 or caldas@mail.utexas.edu

Project Participants | Overview | Project Status | Business Case | Project Participant Activities | Project Deliverables

Project Participants

Overview

This project, being conducted as a joint venture between FIATECH and CII, aims to identify the impact that changes in equipment, material, and information technologies have had on construction productivity. To support this purpose, the project will adapt existing tools and develop a metric to quantify the type and level of technology usage. 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 project will utilize an activity-based analysis in order to control for the number of factors that influence productivity at the project level. Correlating changes in technology with changes in productivity through statistical analysis will allow the project team to identify the order of magnitude that different technological characteristics have had on construction productivity, which will form the foundation for a model to assist future planning and implementation of new technologies. The model will be validated and expanded through field testing of a material tracking system.

Project Status

The project is just getting started. FIATECH is seeking industry experts to serve on technical panel and provide monetary support for the project.

Business Case

Arguably, construction underutilizes technological advancements at its disposal. The relative lack of technology utilization in construction supports the belief that construction productivity has been declining since the 1960s. Studies using governmental industry data indicated that construction's labor productivity declined from 1964 to 2000 at an annual compound rate of -0.72%. Clearly however, the opportunity to improve construction productivity exists, and there is evidence that sectors of the construction industry have experienced long term productivity growth. The ICP research team has examined productivity trends using microeconomic data for 300 activities. The comprehensive results indicate widespread improvement in construction productivity across multiple construction divisions ranging from 0.2% to 2.8% per year between 1976 and 2004. Furthermore, their research found that many of the productivity improvements at the micro level were related to changes in equipment and material technology. The team is also very familiar with studies on Fully Integrated Automated Project Processes (FIAPP) conducted in 1998-2001 by the Sloan Center for Construction Industry Studies (J.T. O'Connor) and the Construction Industry Institute, which highlighted the relatively low level of integrated and automated technology usage in construction and the impact of usage on project performance.

Economic research has shown that technology tends to have a greater impact on labor productivity versus factor productivity measures. For example, investment in new equipment technology may improve a company's labor productivity, but their factor productivity may actually decline if the relative increase in the cost of the equipment outweighs the relative savings in labor costs and gains in output. While there is evidence that improvement in equipment and material technology do have a positive impact on construction productivity, the impact of information technology remains largely uncertain. Although information technology clearly has the capability to improve construction productivity through improved communication, logistics, planning, and resource allocation, exactly how it improves construction productivity is not well understood. CII's FIAPP and FIATECH's efforts, as well as a recent major NIST study, indicate that much potential is to be gained via interoperability alone. As well, there tends to be a required critical mass in terms of adoption before a new technology impacts production. Although electricity was first introduced in the 1880s, it was not until around 1920 that the nation's productivity demonstrated noticeable improvement when the majority of U.S. industrial machinery became electrically powered. It is arguable that the North American construction industry has not reached the critical threshold with regard to widespread implementation and integration of information technology. Certainly, one aspect that helps improve the impact of any new technology, including information technology, are innovations that decrease the investment and maintenance costs along with a comprehensive understanding of how the technology can be most effectively utilized to improve productivity.

There is significant value to be gained for the construction industry if technology could be more effectively leveraged to improve construction productivity. Changes in technology have had a profound effect on productivity in other industries and have prompted industry strategies intended to further promote productivity by leveraging technology usage. Understanding how past technologies have improved construction productivity and demonstrating how new technologies can do the same will help FIATECH and CII member companies identify emerging technologies with the potentially highest rates of return.

Project Participant Activities

  1. Characterize and quantify the order of magnitude of the impact 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 impact of current and new construction technologies on productivity.
  3. Execute field testing of a material tracking and locating technology to validate the predictive model and incorporate characteristics of information technology's impact on construction productivity.

A considerable amount of knowledge exists on the subject of technology and productivity, of which the academics are mostly familiar. They will be able to quickly summarize and share what has already been learned with the research team. To support development of a reliable model, longitudinal data will be required to quantify the impact of material and equipment technology on productivity. The academics already possess longitudinal data spanning three decades on 300 construction activities as referenced in the CII RFP. It will be utilized and extended with new data from the CII Productivity Data Base and other sources collected in these research efforts.

The academics will examine key technologies in regards to their potential impact on construction productivity that parallel the vision of FIATECH's Capital Project Technology Roadmap, including the Valuing Emerging Technologies catalogue. The exploration of key technologies will obviously include technologies that are currently being applied to manufacturing and other industries, but the related efforts will focus on emerging technologies that are being targeted for the construction industry. Finally, the research will focus on technology specifically relevant to the civil, mechanical (piping and boilermakers), and electrical crafts, since these crafts represent the majority of work forces on FIATECH and CII members' projects and typically are critical path activities.

Project Deliverables

  1. Historical comparison of technological innovation in manufacturing and construction and its impact on productivity.
  2. Simple model for determining predictability of productivity improvements of new technology in construction, and where predictability is high, a model for estimating the magnitude.
  3. Prioritized list of technologies from construction, manufacturing, logistics, and other industries in terms of their potential impact on productivity in construction.
  4. Field test of promising new IT technologies for materials logistics management.
  5. Research Summary and Research Reports will include documentation of all research performed and fully support the recommendations and conclusions, including an implementation process for FIATECH and CII member organizations.

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