Repeating recent history
I have written about this before, but it bears repeating. Many in our industry have spent considerable amount of their careers performing inane tasks all in the name of project delivery.
When we dove into the offsite construction challenge, it became very apparent that to make this all work, we needed the production of content (particularly when capturing decisions) to be as fast as possible. Many decisions that are plainly good for the project aren’t taken due to the impacts they could theoretically have on resource and on fee. As discussed in Part 2, we are aiming to allow those impacts to be known much earlier. Our industry is full of tools that automate drawings, schedules or other required files so we are not miles away from removing those highly repetitive tasks from our daily work.
The approach we have taken at KOPE is a little different, though. We are building the ability for the products and systems you use in your projects to carry their own deliverable sets with them, the drawings, the links to other product and systems, their underlying rules. We need to get rid of moments where decisions are translated either from one skillset to another or one file type to another. The data that informs you, should also be the data that gets passed along to the next link in the chain.
If I am a designer and I want to implement a prefabricated structural system within my project, I likely need to articulate that from my own world view. But the team doing structural analysis, the team manufacturing, the team installing, should all be able to derive their instructions from the same dataset. They should not have to pause, assess, re-evaluate, unravel.
Productise
With a productised approach to construction, we may finally have the ability to connect the design, the construction, the manufacturing and the installation information to a digital asset that exists through the whole process. At KOPE, we are working to connect not just the product logic alongside the geometry, but also the expected deliverables explaining how that product exists. Yes, right now, we might think of that as a drawing pack, but as technology evolves and the supply chain becomes more integrated, this may simply be instructions for machines sent in code, financial data sent to those who need it, visuals exposed when required.
Initially, we took the stance that we had the tools to reduce manual, repetitive and error prone tasks. That evolved into allowing people to test quickly and not worrying about spending time drawing or scheduling the outcomes. What now excites us is leveraging the needs of the manufacturer at all points in the process but not labouring design models with complex content when it is not required. So encouraging the user to move away from thinking in LOD (Level Of Detail) terms and more in use case terms.
With our work on KOPE, we are building a platform that allows the construction industry to make better decisions due to more visibility of what is possible. By making those decisions using advanced technology, we support them in exploring a wider array of scenarios than ever before. This gives them back the time to improve project outcomes while spending less time reinventing the wheel and performing menial tasks that don’t leverage the rich knowledge and experience of our industry.
A quiet evolution of what many have been doing for years but productization opens up a whole new world when it comes to connectivity of information. It is time to do away with tasks that restrict us from what we do best; being creative, being insightful, being innovative.
