2020-01-10 | Engineering News-Record: Engineering and construction companies are striving for the type of productivity gains realized in recent decades by their counterparts in manufacturing. And they are fast realizing that the most significant gains come from moving activity that had been completed on site into a shop environment— becoming more like manufacturers themselves.
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I think we really take for granted the level of production scene shops actually put out. When reading this article, I think many of us would say, "wait, we do that already", and they would be right! It is necessary to adopt the offsite construction method in our industry for a variety of reasons, and I think we can certainly continue to learn from our 'parent' industries to further improve our shop efficiency. For example, it would be really nice to fully consolidate all our main hardware into one file for everyone to use, instead of constantly going to Mcmaster to download the same blocks over and over again. A significantly steeper challenge would be to move towards an assembly/subassembly system for design. Many CAD programs out there (Solidworks, Inventor, Siemens NX) use this process in a bottom-up process, where we start with individual parts and assemble those into our final assembly. However, we tend to work more top-down, starting with designer drawing and working our way down to each component. This would require a significant philosophical change to our process, and truthfully I wouldn't really know if it would have the same impact due to the nature and scale of our work, but it would be interesting to see the result. Nevertheless, I think this is a great reminder about how transferable our skills are to other industries, and also encourages us to look at other industries for design solutions.
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