Resilient supply chains in industrialised construction : a Hong Kong case study

Abstract

A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, suggests seven areas that can boost the construction sector productivity including improved supply chain (SC) and onsite execution to overcome the remarkably poor productivity of the construction industry. Although industrialised construction (IC) as an appealing approach has been perceived to improve the productivity of the construction, the fragmented nature of prefabricated SCs nurture variety of vulnerabilities on IC in Hong Kong (HK), and these disruptions beset the industrial performance. Hence, “Supply chain resilience (SCR)” has attracted the emerging interest of academic researchers and industry practitioners which enable proactive disruption management that transcends conventional wisdom and standard practices. This research, therefore, aims to explore the level of vulnerability of IC SCs to the disruptions and proposes a set of counteractive capabilities a firm should develop to withstand these vulnerabilities based on a case study in HK. Data was collected through unstructured interviews with six professionals of the selected case, document reviewing, frequent site visits, and analysed using N-Vivo based content analysis. Thus, the main thrust of this study is to propose strategies to enhance SCR in IC in HK to enhance the productivity of IC through value enhanced SCs.