More than half of site areas idle during construction
By Adam Freill
Construction Leadership SoftwareFirst-of-its-kind international AI-based study finds significant idle times in global look at construction projects.
(Photo courtesy of Buildots)
The larger the construction project, the more space that sits idle in a given week. That was one of the key findings of a recent report released by Buildots, a construction technology firm with an AI-powered construction management platform.
The study, The Numbers Behind Inefficient Construction Practices: A Data-Driven Report, was put together using previously unavailable datasets of highly accurate, real-time information and sheds new light on inefficiency in the multi-trillion-dollar global construction industry.
The study sought to identify key areas of inefficiency in the construction industry, as well as to provide objective practical insights into how to maximize efficiency and reduce costs.
On average, only 46 per cent of areas are used on a project during a given week, leaving tremendous potential to increase a project’s turnaround time, says Buildots. For projects that span over 1,000,000 square feet, average area use is just 10 per cent, whereas smaller projects are generally active in half or more of the space.
A little over 11 per cent of subcontractor visits end with work being left incomplete, although commercial projects spiked much higher in this regard than residential projects, with those sites showing 57 per cent more subcontractor return visits. The study also found that roughly 10 per cent of activities at a given construction site were performed out of sequence.
The research for the report was based on anonymized data collected and analyzed via the Buildots platform from more than 60 construction projects in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, Israel, and elsewhere. Slightly more than half were residential, while the rest were office fit-outs, hospitals, schools and industrial projects. The average project size was 221,000 sq ft and took 16 months to complete.
“Construction companies today lack complete visibility regarding the productivity of their projects and the effectiveness of their management methods,” said Buildots CEO Roy Danon. “The information published in this report not only indicates the issues found across a wide range of international construction projects, but also presents suggestions of how to address them. This holds tremendous potential to drive the industry forward into a new era of data-driven efficiency and progress.”
