Articles:

Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) has long been part of our philosophy and it is exciting to see an increasing focus on DfMA in the construction industry around the world.

Bryden Wood have been pioneers of DfMA and successfully delivered benefits around the world with Platform Construction (P-DfMA) and other types of solutions [.constructionplatformsforasia/s90575/. ]

using a Design to Value approach [.designtovaluest/s93816/.DfMA itself can be based on a set of repeatable elements and processes to derive gains, and ultimately could transform the construction industry so that it more closely resembles manufacturing.

With Industry 4.0 now a key part of many sectors, research and development into construction automation is also a rapidly growing area.Additionally, the skill sets required to implement methods such as Discrete Event Simulation are becoming more commonplace as the industry steadily adopts more facets of digital design..

Despite the advances, construction planning is still typically done using static Gantt charts which, although highly detailed, often have the potential to be inflexible, inefficient and inaccurate, and cannot allow stakeholders to explore fully and rapidly the ‘what if’ of projects and the effects of their decisions on the final product.

A lack of clear visualisation can also limit the communication of the planning to the project team and again result in an unclear relationship between project briefing, design and execution.In 2019, our project with GSK in Parma, Italy, won a ‘Facility of the Year Award’ for social impact from the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE).

The project delivered a finished and operational facility in just 15 months, as opposed to the usual three to four years.The purpose of the facility was to ensure continuity of supply of a vital HIV treatment, and therefore the social value of the project was huge.

The focus was not the building and its aesthetic value, but the process it allowed for, and the lifesaving drug it produced.The social value of this project was the continued development of this drug, and what that brought to the community who relied on it.. We made sure that everyone in the project team understood the importance of the project and felt that they had a personal responsibility to ensure its success.