Abstract
Technological advancement has led to a major shift towards digitalisation of various industries. This shift has been intensifying since 2011 and has been identified as the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) driven by the manufacturing industry. However, 4IR has been so revolutionary that it has opened vast opportunities for various sectors with construction sector adopting it and labelling it Construction 4.0. Contrary to developed countries, developing countries are lagging in Construction 4.0 adoption. This is attributed to their struggling economy and dependence on developed economies leading to questions of how these countries can sustainably adopt and benefit from Construction 4.0. Investigating awareness of Construction 4.0 technologies is a good start to assess the demands, impacts and sustainability of these technologies.
This study aimed to assess Construction 4.0 awareness, adoption barriers and perceived adoption benefits in Eswatini construction sector.
The study was quantitative and adopted a questionnaire survey to solicit data from construction industry participants within Eswatini. The questionnaire survey was distributed to seventy-six (76) construction industry participants via LinkedIn. Thirty-seven (37) responses were achieved online while fourteen (14) requested hardcopies resulting in a 67% response rate. Questionnaire survey used list, categorical, ranking and Likert-scale type of questions to solicit participant data. IBM SPSS Statistics was used to analyse the data and acquire descriptive statistics such as counts, percentages, means and standard deviation to draw conclusions.
Results revealedmoderate awareness level with a mean score of 3.55 but low usage leve with a mean score of 2.08 with AI, IoT and cloud computing well known and mostly used while blockchain and robotics were the least known and used. This observation was uniform across different company sizes, however, less experienced respondents had elevated awareness than experienced counterparts. Prevailing Construction 4.0 adoption barriers were high cost of implementation, technological, resistance to change and difficult implementation while the top five benefits were increased productivity, improved quality, improved resource planning, reduced manual labor, and improved collaboration. These findings will assist construction organizations make informed decisions on which technologies to implement, barriers to avoid and the perceived benefits from Construction 4.0 adoption.