Digitalization of construction supply chain and procurement in the built environment: Emerging technologies and opportunities for sustainable processes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.129093Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Digital supply chain and procurement technologies are explored.

  • A mixed review showing the key areas of construction supply chain for industry 4.0.

  • Main areas of research activities at global and regional levels are identified.

  • Blockchain-smart contracts activities in construction supply chain and procurement are provided.

  • Relationships between digital technologies and sustainability are highlighted for future research in construction.

Abstract

With rapid advances in digitalization, the application of digital technologies for supply chain and procurement processes have been advocated to facilitate revolutionary innovations in the built environment. Therefore, over the past decades, substantial research has been conducted on digital supply chain and procurement technologies (DCSP-technologies) in the built environment, resulting in a vast, fragmented and diverse body of knowledge. In this study, a comprehensive state-of-the-art research on DSCP-technologies in the built environment is presented through mixed review methods, to reveal knowledge areas that are needed to advance digitalization in construction supply chains. The science mapping analysis and qualitative discussions were used to provide insights into the research activities, challenges and opportunities regarding the digitalization of construction supply chains. Six themes including digital construction, digital integration concepts and security were identified, with blockchain-smart contracts being the most recent trend in construction supply chains. Further, future research opportunities including building information modeling (BIM) system integration, Industry 4.0 and emerging DSCP-technologies, cybersecurity and sustainability relationships with DCSP-technologies were provided. This study adds value to construction digitalization literature by providing the comprehensive picture of research explorations, and revealing the research needs essential for researchers and practitioners to develop and advance DSCP-technologies in a digitalized and sustainable built environment.

Introduction

Construction supply chain and procurement (CSCP) is a core artery in a project's lifecycle. It ranges across the planning, construction, delivery and maintenance of projects in the built environment (Jacobsson et al., 2017). Besides the increased recognition for CSCP in providing conducive environments/methods/processes to enhance project performance, CSCP as a subfield in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) is still fraught with the inherent problems, complications and human factors related to construction activities in AEC (Jin et al., 2019). Accordingly, the McKinsey Global Institute Report (2017) highlighted low productivity in CSCP and indicated the use of digital technologies for improvements in CSCP processes. A digital future has been forecasted to be a long-term evolution in the built environment (Morgan, 2019), considering the upsurge in internet usage from the twenty-first century (Cheng et al., 2010), and the recent active outburst of digital technologies in the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) (Pasetti Monizza et al., 2018). Through Industry 4.0, which focuses on digitization and ubiquitous interactions, new and emerging technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts and Internet of Things (IoT) are being explored for potential applications in CSCP processes (Das et al., 2020). However, prior to Industry 4.0 and its technologies, several web-based technologies such as electronic procurement (e-procurement), e-commerce and enterprise resource planning (ERP) were being adopted for CSCP issues including material sourcing, supplier selection, tendering/bidding and progress monitoring (Mehrbod and Grilo, 2018). Inadvertently, the quest to advance digitalization in CSCP has resulted in two streams of digital supply chain and procurement technologies (DSCP-technologies) to offer solutions of efficiency, coordination and optimization that digitization brings in heterogeneous environments. As indicated by Cheng et al. (2010) and Yang et al. (2020), these DSCP-technologies are employed to address issues of transparency, partner integration, trust, coordination, process integrity, communication and information flow in CSCP. With the increase of digital technologies including building information modeling (BIM) and smart construction systems in construction projects, the huge amounts of digital information generated will require DCSP-technologies to tackle the complicated CSCP issues.

Due to these benefits and opportunities, DSCP-technologies have increasingly attracted great attention from several industries including the AEC. More importantly, many researchers have devoted significant amount of studies to this research area, resulting in a large number of research works and publications. Nevertheless, this development poses danger since the resultant literature is vast, fragmented and diverse, which makes it difficult to evaluate and grasp the status quo of the body of knowledge. This situation presents a major risk of overlooking or neglecting essential areas and questions, including, but not limited to, the latest topics and trends, explored and unexplored areas, opportunities and under researched themes for research and practice improvement (Zhang et al., 2020). To tackle this scientific problem, it is necessary to undertake a comprehensive and rigorous review and analysis of research activities in the domain.

Due to the growth potential of digital technologies in CSCP, previous review studies have made valuable contributions. However, they have some limitations. First, most of them highlight only one stream of DSCP-technologies, that is, either the existing DSCP-technologies (e.g. e-procurement, e-commerce and ERP) (Ibem and Laryea, 2014) or the emerging DSCP-technologies (e.g. blockchain and smart contracts) (McNamara and Sepasgozar, 2021). Thus, a holistic view of digital technology applications and its evolving developments in CSCP over the years is lacking in the built environment literature. Second, they have been qualitative manual appraisals (Ibem and Laryea, 2014; Li et al., 2019; Büyüközkan and Göçer, 2018). Hence, these studies are liable to the intrinsic weakness related to purely qualitative reviews. Additionally, qualitative reviews may be impacted by subjective biases as noted by Markoulli et al. (2017) that manual reviews examine the “trees”, and not the broad overview of the “forest”. To that effect, this study adopts a mixed-method approach that combines qualitative and quantitative analysis in reviewing DSCP-technologies research. Third, existing studies focused on narrowed perspectives, a specific area or limited applications of DSCP-technologies in the built environment. For example, Wan et al. (2020) focused on blockchain for information sharing in CSCP. In the light of these facts, these studies do not present the full pictorial comprehension of DSCP-technologies research in the built environment. In fact, a study that captures a complete picture of both the existing DSCP-technologies and emerging DSCP-technologies concerning CSCP in the built environment is still lacking. This raises questions on which technologies have been employed in CSCP and which technologies have been integrated to advance the construction digitalization agenda.

To address this gap in literature, this study aims to present a broader and a more integral review of DSCP-technologies in the built environment. In that regard, this study presents the first comprehensive survey of the knowledge domain and the intellectual landscape of DSCP-technologies research activities in the built environment, using the qualitative and quantitative techniques. The study's contribution to the field lies in; identifying the scope of DSCP-technologies applications in the built environment, detecting the deficient and under-researched areas, and identifying and determining the best signposts for future research in DSCP-technologies to contribute to sustainability.

The target of sustainability in CSCP processes is to improve environmental performance, enhance efficiency and effectiveness, reduce waste and optimize value addition for stakeholders (Badi and Murtagh, 2019). As several processes appear at various parts of CSCP (Koc and Gurgun, 2021), technologies have been introduced into these processes to strengthen economic gains and reduce the environmental impact of products and services in construction delivery. The processes comprised in CSCP can be structured into the four main stages of construction – planning, pre-contract, contract and post-contract, for opportunities to promote sustainability in CSCP with technologies (Fig. 1). For the planning stage, sustainability in CSCP focuses on the application of sustainable design, green specifications for products/materials and green funding schemes for projects. Green funding schemes provide support for developments that have the primary goal of protecting the environment and enhancing social policies to achieve a sustainable economy (Cong et al., 2020). At the pre-contract stage, CSCP aims at efficiency and effectiveness in processes such as bidding, evaluation and sourcing to achieve sustainability. Furthermore, DSCP-technologies employed in sourcing processes could be used to check the environmental compliance and sustainability performance of contractors/suppliers. Regarding the contract stage, sustainability in CSCP looks at green transportation and sustainable production of products/components. Resource efficiency is crucial at this stage. Hence, the transportation for products/materials in the supply operation needs careful evaluation to curb carbon emissions (Chen and Nguyen, 2019). DSCP-technologies could be engaged to monitor the transportation plan of products/components to ensure environmental compliance. The post-contract stage focuses on the aftermath of products delivered/installed for replacement or reuse management. Other initiatives such as reverse logistics could be employed in DSCP-technologies at this stage.

Section snippets

Research methodology

This study employed the mixed-review method through the combination of scientometric analysis and a critical review. As shown in Fig. 2, the scientometric analysis uses quantitative analysis to map the scientific knowledge domain while the critical review focuses on qualitative analysis to explore the research areas identified from the scientometric results. The rationale for integrating the scientometric and critical review analysis is to enhance complementarity via synthesis of results for

Publication trend of DSCP-technologies in the built environment

The earliest study detected for DSCP turned out to be a study by Shapiro (1976), which focused on the correlation between telecommunications networks and industrial developments (Fig. 3). This indicates that the concept of linking digitization with supply chains for growth has been in existence since the 1970s. From Fig. 3, there is generally a steady increase in research interest for DSCP over the decades. The rising interest in recent years could be due to the potential digital applications

Discussions and future directions

The findings from the identification of networks, trending topics and the critical review aided the full pictorial view of DSCP-technologies research activities, to reveal the relevant gaps and future research needs in the built environment. The findings from the critical review enabled future research efforts/activities on DSCP-technologies to be developed as discussed in the subsections below.

Conclusions

With DSCP-technologies aimed at digitalizing CSCP in the built environment and to secure a sustainable future of procuring construction product/services, there is a resurgence of the role DSCP-technologies play towards enhancing sustainability in future construction. Therefore, this study presents the first scientometric-critical review study examining the state-of-the-art global research on DSCP-technologies, to provide opportunities for promoting sustainability in CSCP processes. The findings

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This study forms part of a PhD research study on electronic procurement adoption, which might share similar background with other papers but with different objectives and scopes. The authors are grateful to the Department of Building and Real Estate of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for funding this research.

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