The construction industry needs to adapt quickly to the challenges presented by an ageing workforce alongside new regulatory demands for transparency, all while continuing to deliver the infrastructure, buildings, and industrial facilities needed to support global growth. Manufacturers of building and construction products, while also facing skills shortages, have a vital role to play in leveraging automation to support construction companies as they transition towards more industrialised construction models, enabling specialist expertise to be applied where it adds most value, as Rob Ellinor explains…

Escalating skills shortage

The global shortage in skills is affecting every industry. For both construction and manufacturing companies the existing scarcity of talent is exacerbated by an ageing workforce heading towards retirement. In the UK alone, there are over 140,000 job vacancies in the construction industry today and with over one third of workers expected to retire by 2035 the outlook is bleak. With too few people entering construction and too many leaving, the industry needs to recruit an additional 36,340 workers every year – more than 181,700 over the next five years – to meet forecast demand. Within manufacturing, 97.5% of companies say that hiring and retaining skilled labour poses a significant challenge to their business; with 75% citing shortage of skills as the biggest barrier to growth.

Limited access to training opportunities, shifting career preferences among younger generations, and global economic pressures are all contributing to recruitment challenges. As construction firms seek to maintain output despite workforce constraints, greater emphasis is being placed on productivity, transparency, and process efficiency. In response, organisations across the construction value chain – from product manufacturers to principal contractors and installers – are investing in automation, digitalisation, and data-rich identification technologies such as 2D codes to enable more connected and industrialised construction models.

Efficiency, control, and visibility

While these pressures are being felt across the value chain, construction manufacturers face a unique combination of workforce, productivity, and operational challenges. They aren’t just losing knowledge; they are being tasked with doing more with less. Gone are the days of continuous runs of a single mass-produced product. Even standard products such as plasterboard, cement, and aggregates may now have multiple product variations and SKUs, necessitating shorter runs, more product changeovers, and increasingly tighter schedules. Short product runs and faster turnaround rely on automated, integrated manufacturing solutions that increase control and visibility, while reducing the risk of human error.

Coding automation solutions can utilise existing production data to automate product changeovers, helping to reduce human error, and downtime, and increase overall shift efficiency. The addition of automated inspection tools can further improve efficiency, allowing machine errors to be rapidly flagged to human operators, and problems to be resolved before they produce unnecessary waste. For example, a line equipped with a simple ‘code and check’ vision system can reject substandard products and provide automatic alerts to prompt intervention and allow manual workers to identify the issue affecting code quality.

Integrating machines via industry standards can provide a more complete view of the factory floor, allowing workers to keep lines running with limited downtime. For example, by automating production, coding and inspection through an integrated workflow linked to the manufacturer’s ERP system, human intervention can be eliminated and errors avoided. Integrated dashboards create enhanced visibility that allows bottlenecks to be identified, helping to speed up production and further reduce inefficiencies.

For construction stakeholders, these improvements can contribute to more consistent products, greater production transparency, and improved delivery predictability. Together, these factors can support better planning and coordination across the supply chain, helping manufacturers and construction teams reduce avoidable disruptions and respond more effectively when issues arise.

End-to-end traceability

Automated and integrated manufacturing systems form the foundation for end-to-end traceability in the sector.

Compliance with new EU regulations including the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) will require manufacturers to provide structured, digital product information that can be accessed and shared consistently throughout the lifecycle of a building.

Using automated production data and global standards such as GS1 Digital Link and 2D codes, manufacturers can embed compliance documentation into on-product codes as part of the production process, creating a digital thread from factory floor to construction site.

The creation of an end-to-end digital record can streamline processes, approvals, and sign off, reducing the administrative overhead on construction managers. Beyond compliance, it can help create a richer digital record of the build itself, linking specific products to installation records, inspection data, photographs, and location information. This can support the development of more accurate, as-built records, making it easier to verify what has been installed, demonstrate compliance, and access relevant product information, instruction manuals, or safety data throughout a building’s lifecycle.

Providing this information in a consistent, accessible format can help less experienced workers complete tasks correctly, reducing dependence on a shrinking pool of specialist expertise and supporting knowledge transfer across the workforce.

Expansion of modular construction

Automation is also underpinning one of the biggest developments within the construction industry: the rapid emergence of modular components and building projects. The booming Prefabricated Construction Market provides a solution to the skills shortage, while helping to manage construction costs and demands for environmentally responsible building practices, with market value expected to reach USD 163.93 billion by 2030.

For the construction industry, the modular method is compelling. With components manufactured off-site and building elements partially or fully assembled on site, prefabrication allows construction companies to reduce the amount of skilled labour required on site, improve programme certainty, and reduce on site build lead time. However, it does place greater emphasis on planning, coordination, quality assurance, and product identification to verify, install, and commission increasingly complex assemblies. For manufacturers therefore, modular construction further increases the need for transparency: successful builds depend on 100% component accuracy. Any mistakes in, for example, the provision of the electric cables or other parts required for a modular room construction could result in the entire module being rejected.

Automation is key to efficiently managing new levels of flexibility as lines producing modular components need to quickly switch between component types. Modular builds further reinforce the need for production traceability. With each component tracked through production and matched to a set position in a specific building module, the use of 2D codes will be key to achieving accuracy and product traceability throughout the manufacturing and pre-assembly processes.

Knowledge retention

The rapid adoption of new construction models, including prefabrication, underlines the changes facing heavy industry, not least the vital knowledge being lost as experienced workers leave the workforce. In addition to supporting the traceability and visibility required, automation provides a way to secure and retain knowledge.

Automation is data-driven, backed by analytics that capture the usage characteristics of a manufacturing line. It allows trends and best practices to be recorded and developed into standard policies and operating procedures that can be quickly understood by less experienced staff.

Digital developments and AI often go hand in hand, and construction product manufacturers can leverage the data obtained via automation, alongside AI to further streamline operations, support decision-making, and record actions operators take in response to reports and outcomes. Beyond manufacturing, an area where we are already seeing this play out in the construction industry, is the use of AI search tools to match specific project requirements with an exact SKU where global standards are adopted, this helps to promote “AI selection” of components in design.

There are significant challenges ahead for the construction industry, and construction product manufacturers – as well as the sector as a whole – will need to adapt to remain competitive, and ensure that knowledge is retained, built upon, and made accessible for the future. The tools to support this transition are already place, all that is needed is to implement them effectively.

For manufacturers, the first step is understanding how 2D codes can be integrated into production processes.