When ConstrucTech Meets Manufacturing: A New World Order for Buildings
Stacy Scopano recently joined Skender — a vertically integrated design, construction and manufacturing firm based in Chicago — as chief technology officer.
Consider all the people, materials and steps that take a building from concept to completion. Following design, an arguably dysfunctional bidding process begins, during which general contractors try to compress costs as much as possible without leaving too much on the table. To do so, they either sacrifice (a) margins or (b) quality to win the work. But what if those sacrifices didn’t have to be made? That’s the true potential when we marry the capabilities of advanced technology with modular manufacturing in a highly integrated approach. By applying efficiencies of scale and volume in a factory setting, neither quality nor price need to suffer on a construction project.
In the traditional building industry model, once the project is secured, it’s up to the various stakeholders — architects, planners, acquisitions experts, engineers, project managers, construction superintendents, and a multitude of subcontractors — to try to reconcile reality with the promised cost. Volume production can reduce these inefficiencies, and more importantly, change the need for each stakeholder’s decision making to be driven by maximizing for a single project.