A silent killer in the industry masquerades as a wolf in sheep’s clothing—or perhaps a better metaphor would be a snowball picking up speed as it rolls downhill, rapidly growing in size and severity with each rotation.
A comprehensive review of construction rework published in Construction Management and Economics (2) notes that the consensus among academic papers studying rework in the construction sector is that it’s happening at an increasing rate.
This comes at a contextually worrying time. Consider a 2022 McKinsey article. Analysts called construction’s demand for the talent that’s needed to execute projects a “mismatch” – a labor imbalance where “record job openings” are incongruent with organizational needs. McKinsey adds that the “interconnected nature of the construction value chain means that the labor mismatch generates knock-on effects across the project life cycle and supply chain.”
The McKinsey article is mirrored and perpetuated by more recent data from the ABC, which showed labor shortages reaching a record half a million at the beginning of 2023. Claims made in the 2022 McKinsey article, echoed later by the ABC in their staggering report, have been reinforced by experts – advances in construction automation are absolutely critical, “especially in an industry that has extremely high labor scarcity.” Consider the fallout of these organizational challenges: Up to 25% of material deliveries to sites were either late or incomplete, while in project execution, “difficulty accessing skilled and experienced people was leading some owners to report project delays related to issues around the quality and productivity of on-site work,” the McKinsey article summarized.
Rework (and its associated costs and hit to a construction business’s profitability) is only going to worsen as access to labor becomes scarcer. There are ways to be competitive among in-demand skilled trades, and the industry at large can do more to make careers in construction appealing to young people. In this article, though, we focus our attention to contextualizing the impact of rework on construction and offer some practical remedies to avoid it from happening.
Consensus among researchers—like scholars Asadi et al (1, 2) and Love et all (3, 4, 5) who’ve written extensively on the subject—has suggested that formulating a standard definition of rework can be challenging and depends on context. A simple meaning of rework (4), “as a verb” is to “work again;” however, within the context of construction, “a plethora of rework definitions have been propagated in the literature centered around the themes of quality (i.e. conformance) and change/deviation.”
Navigant Construction Forum™ offers a definition of “rework” from their own review of available literature: “‘Activities in the field that have been done more than once in the field, or activities which remove work previously installed as part of the project regardless of source, where no change order has been issued and no change of scope has been identified by the order.’”
A 2022 Autodesk/FMI-joint white paper said that rework accounted for 5% of the United States’ construction spending of $1.3trillion—in other words, rework is estimated to account for over $65billion annually.
Speaking on the “consequences of rework,” scholarly researchers for academic journal, Engineering (3), said it had “significant, adverse” effects on project, people, and organizational performance and productivity. Scholars writing for Construction Management and Economics (2) highlight that rework represents a large proportion of construction cost overruns – this conclusion is mirrored in an article presented by authors representing Egyptian Benha University in a 2020 review study.
There are many common causes of rework, frequently including poor communication, inadequate collaboration, incomplete architectural drawings, or change orders.
An extensive academic study into the common causes of rework in construction contracts (1) highlights 37 causes of rework causes classified into five categories:
Other common causes of construction rework include:
The industry faces strong headwinds from both a resourcing and a project demand standpoint, but there are mitigation strategies to help you stay leaner and more interconnected organizationally to put you at an advantage over your competitors.
Here are some practical remedies to avoid rework from becoming as a problem for your company:
Building Information Modeling can be used to facilitate collaboration and transparency with clients through immersive, realistic tours of proposed building plans before even breaking ground – quite the sales pitch.
But it can also be used to help mitigate risk and certainly prevent instances where rework may otherwise rear its ugly head. BIM models, what’s more, can be built on top of LiDAR to give stakeholders a realistic impression of what the finished project will look like in its natural environment.
Ensuring tools and materials are onsite before they’re needed is critical to keeping projects on schedule and reducing construction downtime.
Inventory apps like ONE-KEY™ can be used to:
Construction drones can provide site fly-overs equally useful in prepping a site for breaking ground and visualizing any problem areas, as well as delivering real-time project updates.
At the same time, the adoption of construction robots to automate repetitive, dangerous tasks can bring tradespeople out of harm’s way while streamlining procedural tasks that require machine-level accuracy.
Adoption of smart tools in the field, meanwhile, have been seen in the hands of electrical installers requiring specification-grade accuracy and reporting, as well as heavy-duty mechanics requiring certification-level fastening tightness.
Consider some of these statistics from Zippia. 86% of workforce respondents blame poor communication as the main reason for company failures, and 28% of employees believe poor communication is the reason for missed deadlines. Teams with effective communication, meanwhile, see their productivity increase by up to 25%.
Construction has long been plagued by communication breakdowns to a higher degree than the traditional workplace just due to its decentralized nature. However, technology adoption in the industry has seen teams more effectively manage projects and more nimbly respond to change: For example, the ConTech Report from JBKnowledge saw businesses using mobile devices to a higher degree for daily reporting, reality capture, time management, safety management, plan management, BIM file sharing, tool tracking, and drone management.
Examples of tools to improve cross-functional communication among teams and customers:
As a piece to collaboration and breaking down communication barriers, information silos are equally harmful and worthy of mediation.
Building toward construction software interoperability can help:
Offloading preassembly on a prefabricator can help increase speed of build by 20-50%, cut costs by up to 20% and provide quality assurance through a safer, weather-agnostic environment and factory setting that delivers assembly-line quality and productization.
Truly, moving your organization toward industrialized construction moves away from the one-off project mindset to a framework of delivering products – with a mechanized delivery system and a clear customer value chain, fewer opportunities present themselves for design errors.
Digital twins in construction can and should be an extension of your industrialization efforts –these virtual simulations of real systems provide real-time analytics and machine learning that drives a level of predictability to help you manage your operations and profitability.
Benefits include:
Labor scarcity in the construction industry is almost certain to worsen before it gets better, and we as an industry can do more to educate and recruit young people into the fold. However, it’s never been a better time to be faced with such a dilemma—equipped with the technology of today (and what’s just around the corner), contractors, tradespeople, and business owners are empowered to attack these challenges head on.