Getting Ready for 2030: A People, Process, and Technology Roadmap for Offsite Construction
Offsite construction is a game-changing approach that transforms fragmented, site-based construction into integrated, manufacturing-like production. It shows great potential to address the industry’s persistent problems and enhance project performance on multiple levels, but offsite construction is unfamiliar to many organizations and the industry lacks standardized offsite construction practices and guidelines.
Further improvements in offsite construction require changes in the workforce, processes, and technologies to help construction organizations better understand the potential benefits of offsite construction. This book and software tool can help companies develop strategies to better leverage working offsite.
RT-371 identified which key offsite construction skills the workforce needs to acquire by through properly designed and implemented offsite construction training and workforce development programs (FR-371, in press).
The team identified offsite construction skills in the following three workforce categories, which also appear in the accompanying figure:
- Design and Engineering
- Construction and Fabrication
- Administrative
RT-371 found that future offsite construction processes will be different from the current state of practice. As the figure shows, the industry needs to move in several ways to deliver efficient offsite construction:
- From single-trade prefabrication to modularization
- From customized offsite components to standard offsite components
- From permanent offsite construction structures to portable/relocatable offsite construction structures
- From reliance on single-skilled labor to multi-skilled labor
On the other hand, as the bottom trend shows, the team found that there would be no change in the industry’s reliance on highly skilled labor (FR-371, in press).
RT-371 identified the key trends and technologies that were being used by offsite construction in 2020, as the figure shows (FR-371, in press).
Furthermore, RT-371 identified the top 10 technologies with the highest potential to be of greater use and benefit in the future (2030) as compared to their current use (2020):
- Drones and remote monitoring
- Smart sensors
- Artificial intelligence interface
- Extended reality
- Integrated real-time project management information systems
- Wireless technology
- Big data and data ecosystem
- Robotics
- Internet of things
- nD printing and additive manufacturing
RT-371 developed and validated an offsite construction maturity model comprising five levels (i.e., initial, repeatable, defined, managed, and optimizing) as well as three areas (people, process, and technology), as the figures below show (FR-371, in press).
Organizations in the “initial” or lowest maturity level have disorganized offsite construction development. By contrast, organizations that have reached the “optimizing” maturity level realize the full potential of offsite construction and constantly look for improvements.
To help organizations in implementing the proposed offsite construction roadmap, RT-371 developed and validated a maturity scoring system (FR-371, in press).
The scoring system provides the five main outputs shown in the figure. The first three outputs show individual scores (out of 15) for three areas: People, Process, and Technology. The other two outputs include an overall score that combines the three individual scores into a single weighted metric that reflects the organization’s offsite construction maturity level or capabilities, and the percentage of practices the organization implemented when the tool evaluated its offsite construction maturity.
