Off-Site Manufacturing: Determining Decision-Making Factors

Abstract

New technologies like modular construction are expected to increase the market share in developing countries with a high annual growth rate such as in Egypt. Modular construction solutions that have content depending on the process of off-site construction and on-site transportation gained prominence over recent years due to several benefits, especially their positive impact on the environment. Off-site manufacturing (OSM) and traditional technologies like on-site ones differ in many aspects of design, requirements, logistics, engineering, and others. Many researchers studied modular construction and they fall short of investigating modular construction processes comprehensively and completely. In this paper, the barriers and benefits of using off-site manufacturing (OSM) are collected from the previous studies (that focused on mega projects, high quality, and fast-track projects) to be analyzed using a social network analysis (SNA) to promote the implementation of this new technology mainly in high-annual-growth-rate countries. A survey was used to solicit the opinions of construction practitioners to identify the most significant barriers and obstacles, as well as the benefits of using OSM. Also, due to the capabilities of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to manage shared information and increase the cooperation among project parties, the integration of OSM and BIM is investigated as a promising approach to overcome OSM barriers and enhance its utilization. Analyzing the main barriers’ density and finding out the main solution are involved. Applying this case to a real project in Egypt to study the impact of using (OSM) on-site and exporting the data are also involved. With some results related to the other results and disadvantages that were deduced, the most important advantages and most disadvantages emerged, as well as finding ways to solve them and practical application on the ground.