Some of the necessary work will be boring, and it will be a grind to make the data interoperable and set the transaction mechanisms.
In the US, there have been several conferences about ‘industrialized construction,’ and players like Katerra and Factory_OS are developing their own vertically integrated offers..Overall, there is a global recognition that a more manufacturing-like approach is needed.
‘Volumetric’ seems to be the first and most obvious starting point, but we believe there is a need for a wider and more sophisticated ecosystem of DfMA.There may be parallels with what happened with BIM.The UK was the first to mandate Building Information Modelling and our standards became quite widely adopted, or were at least used as a starting point, globally.
It will be interesting to see if construction Platform design has a similar global appeal, once people have understood the limitations of modular.. COVID-19: accelerating the shift to construction Platforms?.COVID-19 has simply accelerated this journey, or accentuated the need to move forwards at speed.
As a result, the UK government is now looking to double down on the current plan to develop construction Platforms and to make things happen even more quickly.
This should send a strong message to the construction industry.The first step is to gather that information.
We use a number of strategies – including questionnaires and in-depth workshops with client teams – to gather as much qualitative and quantitative data as we can.We then review the data, organise, consolidate and present it back to the client, to check our understanding and its validity and accuracy.. Then we identify and agree a number of potential scenarios with the client, which describe a hypothetical future – for example, a change in market direction – from a number of different perspectives; commercial, operational etc.
We then look to identify potential solutions or options and evaluate how these perform against the problem statement and value drivers in the agreed scenarios.. We combine a number of clear strategic directions with a systematic exploration of potential improvements at different levels of detail, using the ‘5S method’ as guidance.This is an established methodology for handling workplace organisation, which breaks the master planning process down into five steps: sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain.. At each stage we determine the appropriate level of detail (resolution) at which to visualise and model, depending on whether we are looking at the whole site or a single unit or process, for example.. We present the options or solutions and our evaluation back to the client and agree whether there are further options to be considered or whether the existing options need to be adjusted.