Developing a Digital Assembly planning and tracking solution that supports Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) compliant delivery strategy
Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) has enabled a global shift in the industry from labor-intensive processes to prefabricated/manufactured production assembly setups that can ensure efficient project delivery in a controlled environment, driving safety, quality, and sustainability. The Local construction industry is also embracing the virtue of offsite manufacturing and has experienced good development since last decade. However, the construction projects could not be 100 percent offsite or onsite. They will always be a combination of offsite and onsite workflows. Additionally, Planning and controlling for both delivery methods demand a distinguished approach due to a clear difference in the working environment, variability, processes, and deliverables. Yet, the prevailing planning practices are either generalizing or treating both workflows in isolation, making either of them slow down or impacting the other one. As a result, despite committing to an offsite delivery approach, most of the projects are yet to realize true efficiency and performance enhancement through DfMA. Therefore, there is a need for developing an easy-to-use planning and tracking solution that can integrate both, onsite and offsite workflows to effectively gain the benefits of DfMA and hence the offsite production.
To enable this, an IDD Integrated Design Delivery (IDD) approach of connected systems can ensure information is communicated seamlessly between offsite and onsite stations, as well as between all the relevant stakeholders. VisiLean, the Lean-BIM integrated construction management solution, designed as a central platform for production management and control has been hypothesized to serve as a potential bridge to close the gap between onsite and offsite planning. There have been already some work done with Nihon University in Japan recently. The objective of this research is to take this exploration further.
