The construction industry has been one of the few industries that has not dramatically changed in the way it produces the final product. It has always been for the most part a remote outdoor factory environment, dependent upon highly skilled labor that travels to the site on a daily basis, subject to various competing schedules for the labor force, coordination of materials in a timely manner, and subject to the weather of the day, be it rain, snow, cold or heat.
There is no factory that will be able to produce at its highest level of efficiency consistently with site circumstances and with so little control over the variables involved in producing the final product that the construction industry has faced for a millennial. The major improvements to this industry have been tools and equipment used on site and project management tools used to manage all of the variable involved in the production of the final product, this is what we call organized chaos. However, there have been some efforts over the past couple of decades to improve this situation and that has been through modular construction and panel construction. But that has brought on new challenges and limitations such as cost to ship modules that are large and have lots of open space inside each module, or wall, floor, and roof panels that are too large as well for shipping, the cost to manufacture them and have the necessary state inspections within the factory to ensure the module or panels meet all applicable national and local building codes as no inspections inside the walls of the module can be completed once on site, and the size of a factory to support the construction of the modules or large panels. Some of the limitations are the ceiling height limitations due to the shipping requirements, the width of the module is again limited due to the size required for shipping. The cost to transport long distances and the fact that you are paying to bring large materials to the factory in raw form and then paying to ship them out in finished form with more open space in them than they came in with.
At least in the case of modular construction, the time is improved, the quality is improved, but the cost is not less and the limitations that come with it also limit the types of projects that work well for this method. In the case of panel construction, it only impacts the framing part of a project, which is about 20% of your overall project and while there can be time and cost savings here you are only affecting the saving in 20% of your overall project, not the project as a whole and there are also limitations to the size of the panels that are being built today.
Thus, we need a new mindset for improving this industry and the methods employed to improve it. The major challenge to this has been the lack of desire to stop and think through how best to make the needed changes to the industry as a whole and not just to some specific elements of it, and then do the necessary research to ensure the new methods will work. We are all too busy trying to build and afraid to stop or slow down to try something new as the demand and pace needed to keep up does not provide a desire to stop and make changes that require more forethought when things are being successfully built everyday regardless of any changes.
We need an R&D team that is working with all elements involved in construction, that entails working to provide new methods and means by incorporating the whole of construction, to know what is available in the market as well, and to discover what still needs to be invented.
Segmental Modular Construction is the means and method to tie immediately change the means and methods of the construction industry, but we need to incorporate a national R&D team to develop better ways to build that will save time, money, and labor and in the end produce better products for less as any factory environment tends to do better than individual efforts. A collective team, with focused and central leadership will lead to achieving better results for the long-term future success of construction.
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