Significant technological advancements over the past two decades have made technology an integral part of our everyday lives. These technological advancements have resulted in a substantial shift towards digitisation for industries, including the construction sector, which calls this shift Construction 4.0. Construction companies need to understand the Construction 4.0 concept and adopt and benefit from it. Comprehensive knowledge of Construction 4.0, however, remains limited, especially in developing countries. This research adopts a questionnaire survey distributed to construction industry players in Eswatini to assess Construction 4.0 awareness and usage levels, adoption barriers, and benefits. Results reveal moderate awareness but low usage of most Construction 4.0 technologies, with AI, IoT, and cloud computing well known and widely used, while blockchain and robotics were the least known and used. This observation holds across company sizes; however, less experienced respondents had higher awareness than their more experienced counterparts. Prevailing Construction 4.0 adoption barriers included high implementation costs, technological challenges, resistance to change, and complex implementation. At the same time, the top five benefits were increased productivity, improved quality, improved resource planning, reduced manual labor, and improved collaboration. This paper will assist construction organizations in making informed decisions about which technologies to implement, which barriers to avoid, and the perceived benefits of adopting Construction 4.0.

Keywords

Construction 4.0, Digitisation in Construction, Technology Adoption Barriers, Eswatini Construction Industry, Productivity and Quality Improvement.