A Comparison Of Production Efficiency Between Prefabrication And Traditional Construction Methodology

Despite the benefits of technology in the production industry,construction has not been able to keep with their counter parts in mechanical engineering and the production industry in integrating the available technologies to achieve higher production.This is due to the fact that construction is site based and its value chain relies heavily upon collaboration with customers,subcontractors and other key stakeholders.As a result,construction projects are more complex and requires a high amount of specialist knowledge.Furthermore,construction industry contains a lot of small and medium sized firms with limited resources to invest into potential research in more advanced methods resulting in a fragmented production chain further decreasing productivity.Prefabrication technologies have had wide acceptance,that due to transferring a large part of the production process to some off-site facility,it will improve the industry’s productivity.This study aims to discover from an input/output perspective,input being manpower,which trades gains the most benefits from prefabrication when compared with a building built using traditional methods.The study applies DEA analysis to data gathered from Singapore that Prefabrication methods are not as efficient as traditional in most of the 14 trades examined in this study.The study collected data from two building projects,totalling 1200 units in total.The data was gathered in Singapore due to the vast support for prefabrication from the Singaporean government,and furthermore Singapore has geographical advantages in applying prefabrication including infrastructure and neighbouring countries having cheap land and labour for contractors to set up their factories.For a main contractor to bid for a public housing project in Singapore,the main contractor must use 90% or above prefabricated modules in order to enter the bid.These conditions makes Singapore a country where most prefabrication is applied.The DEA models applied includes CCR,BCC and Scale efficiencies.Some research gaps this study aims to bridge are: Which trades gain improvements in manpower efficiency when using prefabrication to construct versus traditional.This study hopes its results can help contribute to the healthy development of prefabrication in the construction industry.