Maturity Models in Off-Site Construction and Analysis of Lean Incorporation: Review

Abstract

The adoption of off-site construction (OSC) is still uncertain although many contributions to its promotion have been made. In many studies, lean construction (LC) has been declared to be the most suitable approach to support managing OSC, but there are challenges regarding its incorporation into OSC. A maturity model (MM) has been proposed to evaluate and guide OSC adoption. However, the literature shows misunderstandings about the MM structure and how these models incorporate LC. This article aims to review maturity models (MMs) developed in the OSC field to identify benefits and deliver deep insight into their structure and the incorporation of LC. The methodology involved three steps: (i) systematic literature review (SLR) of OSC-MMs, (ii) thematic analysis to identify associations among MM benefits, OSC barriers, and LC challenges, and (iii) analysis and interpretation of results. The findings suggest that MMs developed in OSC are incipient, many of them suffer bias and have weaknesses in their structure, and LC incorporation is poor and not explicit in most OSC-MMs.