Some games feature staged construction. For example in Last Oasis you lay down a vehicle ghost, and then have to provide resources to complete multiple stages of its construction.
While ultimately this is no different than having all the resources at a go, it lends a feeling of completing something larger, and also let's you potentially break up big builds into more manageable pieces.
At least something that may also be useful is the ability to dump items into a repair and work up towards the total requirement. This occurs with building where the ghost sucks up inputs, it woud be nice for repairs as well.
I envision this being neat for future releases and large end game projects.