OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION


programme (such as patient rooms, ‘exam’ rooms, surgery rooms, and bathrooms, etc.) inside each hospital, and discovered a series of patterns of non-standard modules. The next step was to remove unnecessary variation and standardise parts. Once standardisation was understood, they were able to design and manufacture (for example standard bathrooms, headwalls, or MEP racks) in a way that can be interchanged in different projects (Fig. 6), and can win the approval of different regulatory healthcare bodies in different states.


Offsite: are we in a revolution, or is it just the start?


Over the years Chris Giattina’s BLOX offsite manufacturing enterprise had to develop methodologies to pack, ship, and lift these parts on building sites. In each version, they developed a new manufactured element or process that improved on the previous one. Currently, BLOX has a moving assembly line that constructs the offsite pieces of the building manually. Chris Giattina is critical of this, and thinks BLOX is manufacturing the way we used to manually produce planes during World War II. He dreams of moving the process of building manufacturing to the model via which Boeing today makes aircraft on its ‘787’ programmes.


Boeing manufactures a plane by ‘chunking’ it around 50 parts. Each part is assembled by a different manufacturer; for example, the front fuselage is assembled in Kansas, the centre fuselage in Italy, the wings in Japan, and the wing tips in Korea. Boeing just brings all these pre-assembled parts together in its gigantic warehouses, reportedly reducing the development time and costs for the plane by outsourcing 70% of the development and production to these 50 suppliers that are world experts in producing these pre-assembled aircraft parts.8


Similarly, Chris Giattina


thinks a more advanced manufacturing vision for the design and construction industry will need a dramatic shift in supply chain strategy, in which an ‘ecology’ of suppliers could compete for particular functions of the building. With time, major suppliers could invest in research and development that would, he says, ‘improve their processes explosively’.


Offsite: standardisation and customisation


In standardisation, there must be variations because there are different sites, markets, clients, and special conditions that make each project unique in the construction industry. In order to advance ideas of variation and standardisation, BLOX has designed chassis modules – a 15 x 15 x 60 ft module that can be deployed to many parts of a hospital, such as a CT unit, X-ray, a central plant room, a laboratory, or a patient room. Most of


these parts are delivered to the job site as flat or volumetric parts (Fig. 7). The speed of design and construction are critical aspects. In one of the projects that BLOX completed the construction price was 20% below the cost of traditional construction. However, if one monetises the speed of design and construction, and includes the cost benefits of being able to use the facility before it would be completed via traditional on-site construction, then the total price goes down to 40%. Part of the BLOX workforce is fully dedicated to developing digital tools to fully automate the ‘kit of parts’. This will further improve the speed and control of the


manufacturing and assembly of buildings. Conclusions


In this paper, I have included two case studies which reflect on how ‘offsite’ construction is moving forward in healthcare construction in the US. We think that moving construction operations to a more controlled environment, such as the ones we can find in offsite warehouses, is the first step towards further automating the construction of healthcare facilities. Today the manufacturing is still manual, perhaps similar to the type of labour we saw in the early days of car and aircraft manufacture. However, as these processes mature, gradually these operations became more efficient and automated; not only does manufacturing activity then improve, but also the procurement of materials, and speed of design, engineering, and production, alongside simplified inventory management, higher quality, and lower production costs. We can argue that what is different this time with the ‘manufacturing of construction’ is the rising amount of venture capital coming into construction technology in the US. According to CB Insights, new construction technology companies received in 2017 a total of US$ 882.3 million in investment from venture capital in 103 deals. In August 2018, that number doubled, as venture capital companies had already invested up to US$1.42 billion across 65 deals. We soon will also begin to witness reports of delays and failures on these 3 to 5-year-old new ventures. These enterprises will begin to encounter similar growing pains to those experienced by other disruptor companies, such as Apple, Tesla, and Amazon, in other sectors. These ‘new disruptors’ will need an additional period to develop their manufacturing and automation processes, but they will not go away.


2 Rose-Anderssen C, Allen PM, Tsinopoulos C, McCarthy I. Innovation in manufacturing as an evolutionary complex system. Technovation 2005; 25 (10): 1093–105.


3 Bertelsen S. Complexity – Construction in a new perspective. Proceedings of the 11th IGLC conference, Blacksburg VA, 2003.


4 Gidado KI. Project complexity: The focal point of construction production planning. Construction Management and Economics 1996; 14: 213–25.


5 Björnfot A. Industrialization of Construction – A Lean Modular Approach. Proceedings of the 12th IGLC conference, Elsinore, Denmark, 2004.


6 Andía A, Spiegelhalter T. (2015). Post- parametric Automation in Design and Construction. Boston; London, Artech House, 2014.


7 Hoover S, Snyder J. A New Era for Modular Design and Construction. FMI Builtworlds, 2018.


8 Tang CS, Zimmerman JD, Nelson JI. Managing new product development and supply chain risks: The Boeing 787 case. In: Supply Chain Forum: An International Journal 2009; 10 (2): 74-86. Taylor & Francis.


Alfredo Andia hej


References 1 Gibb A. Standardization and pre-assembly – distinguishing myth from reality using case study research. Construction Management and Economics 2001; 19 (3): 7-15.


Alfredo Andia, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor at Florida International University, Miami, He is the co-author of the book, Post-parametric Automation in Design and Construction, Artech House, 2015. He has published more than 70 articles on the impacts of information and automation technology in the design and construction Industry, and has been the co-organiser of a number of conferences, including the International Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 2016, and the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) 1997.


August 2019 Health Estate Journal 27


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