Suppose I want to buy a new watch, tired as I am of fumbling around in my pockets to check the time on my iPhone: I’m certainly not expecting a team of skilled watchmakers to turn up at my house, hunker down in the study, and begin crafting an intricate mechanism of cogs and springs, before carefully turning out a watch case, and then sitting around drinking tea while they wait for some other fellow to arrive with a leather strap... I just want a new watch, and I’d prefer it to be made somewhere else before being delivered where I need it: my home or (increasingly less likely) a local store. None of that is even remotely contentious, not least because it’s how we’ve been producing things since the Industrial Revolution. However, it may surprise you that one crusty old group of troglodytes is still adopting an end-point system as its business model… we’re talking about Dinosaur Construction.
It's been well said that nobody in their right mind would ever contemplate building a car in a muddy field, struggling through the rain to put the drive train in place…and it makes no sense to point out that the farmer who wants the car lives in the next meadow. But, in effect, that’s exactly what Dinosaur Construction companies have been doing for at least the last three hundred years: paying workers to sit idly in wooden huts while they wait for the rain to stop and then watching them trawling aimlessly around, trying to find the steelworks, pipework, and electrical units that were delivered months ago, but now lie buried under a heap of brickwork and discarded timber, all bucolically landscaped beneath a bank of grass and weeds.
Little wonder then that more and more of these Dinosaur Contractors have turned insolvent in an age of emerging technologies (think Carillon)…because, if it’s not defunct already, end-point construction will soon be as dead as a dodo, and it’s also, incidentally, why I’m not expecting a team of watchmakers to knock on my door any time soon.
The future of construction will instead be driven by ConstrucTech…and 3D Volumetric technologies in particular.
3D Volumetric sit at the very heart of modern construction, enabling modular units to be crafted in an environmentally secure environment before being shipped off for final assembly where the building is needed (finally allowing antiquated end-point construction to disappear in a puff of rain-soaked dust…assuming saturated dust can puff at all). Carefully modulated “just in time” delivery systems also ensure that none of the materials delivered is ever likely to get lost under a bank of weeds and grass.
Houses, schools, hospitals, and office buildings (temporary or permanent)… can all be created at least 30% faster, at far higher quality, and up to 50% cheaper by using 3D Volumetric technologies (www.newengineer.com).
And as I write this, more than 15% of new builds across the globe are being completed (or have been completed) using cutting edge Modular technologies…given they intrinsically deliver a much more sustainable final product, too (with reduced wastage and higher productivity levels), that figure is only likely to increase as we build our way towards a better future.
I’m listening now…no, still no knock on the door from the watchmakers.
Some things don’t need a lot of explaining…and the ultimate redundancy of end-point production is one of them.