Adoption of Offsite Manufacturing in the Housing Sector: Challenges, Benefits, and Future Opportunities

Over several years, reliance on traditional onsite 'brick and mortar' construction, which is slow and prone to errors, has failed to address the growing issue of housing shortfall. Building houses is in high demand all across the world. To tackle the housing shortfall, the sector is adopting modern construction methods like as offsite manufacturing. Offsite manufacturing has been proposed as a suitable method for building new homes in various countries by academics and practitioners. They thoroughly documented the benefits in terms of building cost, speed, and quality. Although this technology has several important advantages, its present utilisation in the building sector is limited. The definitions, history, and terms used in different countries about the technology are presented. To find the reasons and fill the gap, the current study aims to investigate and explore the barriers to adopting offsite manufacturing in the housing sector and also, the benefits of utilizing offsite manufacturing. An expert questionnaire survey was designed for the findings in the literature review and sent to the stakeholders, there were 25 responses. The responses are statistically analysed. The results identified the barriers to the wider adoption as lack of design flexibility, negative image, lack of manufacturers, and previous experience and advantages in terms of scheduling, cost, time, productivity, reduction in construction waste, and increase in health and safety. Furthermore, the research explored how to improve the better use of offsite manufacturing in the housing sector. A theoretical framework was presented for better outputs by implementing offsite manufacturing in the housing sector.