One of London’s newest flagship residential projects wanted to know if they could benefit from Saint Gobain’s offsite solution InteWall for use in internal partitions. While InteWall enhances productivity, reduces waste and improves programme certainty, it benefits most from early design engagement to be fully utilised.
The challenge was that the project had been designed with a traditional track system in mind and was already out for tender.
Knowing the risks of shoehorning an offsite solution into a project at this late stage, Saint-Gobain’s had to quickly apply their system and assess the level of standardization on the project while minimising the number of bespoke components being manufactured. Building bespoke components is not only inefficient but also expensive and would ultimately determine which route would be correct for the project.
Approach:
Saint Gobain had digitized InteWall on KOPE leveraging the system’s component data, including; panel sizes, build ups, and manufacturing limitations, combined with the assembly and construction logic required to deliver an effective solution on-site.
Using the live project design file, KOPE identified the relevant building elements to apply the solution to, configured and then placed manufacturable components to those elements following the rules of the system. Then it generated a 3D model, quantification data, design and manufacturing drawings and more to help assess the suitably of the system for the project.
Implementation:
The 50 storey residential design file was uploaded to KOPE’s cloud based software. The wall types within the design model were identified and matched with the Party Wall and Internal Partition product configurations on KOPE.
Hit run. KOPE got to work.
Results:
Within 4 minutes, just enough time to make a decent brew, KOPE configured and applied 30,000 manufacturable partition panels throughout the model.
Immediately, the team identified the Party Wall panels were suitable for the project, with a high level of standardisation and suitability throughout all floors. However the standardisation rate for the internal partitions was far too low to be viable, requiring a significant number of costly bespoke panels to be manufactured.
Returning to the product configurator, KOPE ran an optimisation algorithm to marginally adjust door opening locations of the project design file by +/-25mm to suggest tweaks to the design that could help improve the standardisation rate of the Internal Wall panels. This reduced the number of bespoke panel types by over half, but the standardisation rate was still too low and the team needed to know why.
KOPE had identified a very high number of non-buildable areas across the building. By reviewing these areas, it revealed the services penetration locations through the partitions were causing constructability issues for the offsite system. A different non-material rearrangement of the services would have resulted in a working solution but there was no time to undertake this work given the stage of the project and tendering process.
Conclusion:
With marginal design adjustments earlier in the project process, Saint Gobain’s InteWall system would have been a wholly viable alternative to the traditionally designed partition design. They were able to quickly identify where in the building their offsite solution was and was not suitable with KOPE, a process that done manually by a skilled team designing and placing BIM components across the floor plates, would take as much as 3 days per floor.
Instead, the team were able to pursue a hybrid offering, utilising the benefits of both their offsite and on-site solutions were most suited throughout the building, giving some of the benefits originally hoped to the client.
