Benefits of Prefabricated Construction
In the construction industry, prefabrication refers to the process of manufacturing components of a structure or even the entire building away from the actual job site. The workers will have to complete any finishing work and ensure that the structure is safe and secure before the project is signed off, and the structure is put into use.
The popularity of this process is in large part down to the reduction in labour and materials costs that can be achieved when prefabrication is used. While this method was once seen as a low-end method used for mass development, prefabrication has come a long way since, with even civil engineers now relying on its use to minimise project costs. Even professional outsourcing partners like The CAD Room have begun to adopt the use of prefabrication to make projects as lean as possible.
So, what are some of the main benefits you could enjoy if you too switched to using prefabricated construction in your projects? Read on to find out.
Structure Design Flexibility
Workers can easily take down and move sub-assemblies between different sites, significantly reducing the demand for raw building materials while also increasing the flexibility of the final structural design. This is one of the main reasons why prefabrication is becoming more and more common with contractors and homeowners both enjoying the flexibility that comes along with it in terms of the structural design.
Reduced Costs
We have already briefly touched upon the cost-saving benefit of using prefabricated construction. As construction costs continue to soar year after year, profit margins shrink, and contractors must do everything that they can to improve those margins.
While the cost of building materials can only be negotiated on so much, and labour costs doing nothing but rising, what contractors can do is help to offset these rising costs by using modular construction. This cuts down on labour costs as less assembly time is required, which can then help to offset rising material costs. Modular construction – another name for prefabrication – is also great for reducing costs because buying in bulk allows prefabrication manufacturers to pass on material savings to contractors, which makes this cost far more favourable than that of purchasing the raw building materials.
Uniformity and Consistency
As prefabricated construction takes place away from the job site itself, the process can be far more tightly controlled and regulated to ensure that each structure adheres to the specified designs and dimensions supplied. This ensures that when multiple units are needed across different job sites and even projects, their uniformity can be ensured and consistency in build quality guaranteed. That is, because unlike onsite construction, the same team usually is in charge of the entire build, doing away with the variably quality achieved on job sites by different teams and team members carrying out the build as they see fit according to their interpretation of the specification.
Environmentally Friendly
Reducing your carbon footprint and becoming more environmentally friendly have both been critical issues in the construction industry for several years now, with manufacturers doing all they can to make their business more “green”. Prefabrication has already been recognised as both a sustainable form of construction and an energy-efficient one, making it far more environmentally friendly than traditional construction methods that often lead to the excess waste of materials.
