Digital Building Blocks for Modular Construction Industry

The modular building has made a name for itself in recent years - its versatile and extensive use drew attention of many industry enthusiasts, who were willing to explore modular solutions in further detail.

We’ve already touched on the modular construction industry trends in our previous article. Today, we are therefore going to focus more on the state of the industry up-to-date, the benefits of modular building and the challenges it brings. Don’t worry, we know it’s a lot to swallow, so we'll take it slow.

The State of Modular Construction Today

As promised, we will start from the industry’s current situation. To tell you the truth, looking at the industry as a whole now we can see that it’s the industry that is continuingly growing at a very healthy rate. It is estimated that CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) will grow around 4.5% throughout the next five years!

However, in comparison to other parts of the world, the UK are kind of late adopters of this technology in regards to modular building. In 2021, only 7.5% of new homes were built using modular technology, compared to 45% in Sweden - a far earlier adopter of modular building technology. That’s a huge difference!

The Benefits of Modular Construction

Now, looking at the benefits of modular building technology, the ones that we found the most appealing are:

• 01

  Huge time savings
  Using modular technology can bring your company huge time savings, particularly in production and delivery of this type of building. How? Thanks to modules being prefabricated off-site and transported afterwards, without any delays, your projects can be finished much faster.

• 02

  Sustainability
  Another important factor when using a modular building method is its sustainability. It can be far more sustainable than traditional building methods and materials - the fact that you can reuse modules helps reduce material waste, while low energy consumption leads to minimal on-site pollution.

• 03

  Higher quality
  When using modular construction, you are likely to end up with a much higher quality product, which is really what we all want, isn’t it? Considering that the modules are created away from the building site, in a designated factory, greater attention is being paid to the quality of products.

• 04

  Cost effectiveness
  It can also be far more cost effective by putting together the construction elements in house, in a factory and transferring them to sites for quick builds.

• 05

  More bespoke options
  Last but not least, using modular building technology offers far more bespoke options for the consumer or the client than traditional home building in particular.

The Challenges of the Industry

Unsurprisingly, despite its potential and huge number of benefits, the modular construction industry faces a few challenges on a daily basis that cannot go unnoticed. The most apparent issues include:

• Difficulty in finding trades that do the on-site assembly of modular units

• Integrating modules on-site

• Transporting modular units to the construction site

• Responsibility for handling callbacks for modular units

• Lacking processes to ensure that the units are built to a high standard

• The modular industry may not yet be prepared to deal with large-scale projects

Archdesk’s Solutions

Even though there seem to be a lot of issues in regards to modular construction, Archdesk can give you a perfect solution to every single challenge listed above. Wanna find out? Take a look at this table:

Having the right Project Control in place and the planning leaves no room for any unprecedented incidents to happen along the way. While using Asset and Resource Management, you can identify the best trained and experienced people that are gonna be matched to the upcoming projects. Using our Schedule and Programme Management will make sure there is a schedule to follow and that every task is done right and every module is assembled in the right order.

Having a bit more Standardisation across the way in which each project operates and flows goes a long way towards addressing the lack of processes verifying the high quality of the units.

Having Digital Forms mapped to certain processes to capture all the information on-site will make sure things and sections are signed off as completed and approved. Finally, our Dashboard Reporting will help you understand whether the scaling can occur within your business and if so, will give you confidence to start larger projects.