Drivers towards Industry 4.0 Adoption among Construction Engineering Practitioners in Malaysia

Abstract

Malaysian construction industry has become one of the economic catalysts with possibilities to adopt and adapt new digital transformation towards better development. Nonetheless, the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies is still low in the construction industry, thus triggering the notion of this study. This study intents to investigate the drivers towards enhancing the adoption of Industry 4.0 in construction. This study utilized the quantitative approach, where data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey in the form of face-to-face meeting. A total of 42 sets of responses were collected from the construction industry practitioners based on Public Works Department (PWD) projects. The data was further analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) Package using the Factor Analysis (FA) to extract the key components of the drivers. This study provides empirical evidence for the classification of the 21 drivers retrieved from the previous literature according to the respective components of drivers. Findings from the factor analysis have identified the perceived drivers by the respondents and subsequently divided into two clusters, which are internal factors and external factors. The internal factor describes the organization, economic, technology and innovation drivers. Meanwhile, the external factor consists of legal, environment and people drivers. Hence, this study may contribute to the fundamentals of establishing theoretical frameworks for Industry 4.0 adoption towards construction industry development.