Prefabrication In Construction

On April 21, the DEWALT® Total Trade Solutions team hosted a live webinar: “Prefabrication in Construction.” Joining the DEWALT team was guest speaker Jared Christman, owner of BIMCAD Solutions and first-ever recipient of the NECA MEP Innovator of the Year Award.

During the one-hour session, Jared took listeners through his journey in prefabrication – including why and how he got started, the challenges he faced along the way and how he overcame them and provided his tips and best practices to help companies best leverage prefabrication for success.

Missed the session? Read the summary or watch the video recording below.

The Benefits of Leveraging Pre-Fabrication

Jared began the session discussing the importance of prefabrication and how it can address some of the major challenges in today’s industry – the shortage of skilled labor and worker safety.

Jared cited examples from his own personal journey in which he was able to

• Achieve significant labor savings by standardizing designs
• Decrease his labor rate by standardizing measurements
• Reduce his schedule by utilizing prefab to overcome weather obstacles and
• Improve safety amongst his workers by bringing work into a controlled environment.

Turning Challenges into Learning Opportunities

While Jared was able to make great strides in his journey in pre-fabrication, his success did not happen overnight. He discusses how his first year of prefabrication was a total failure, jumping straight into projects which were too large and without the proper support. After a challenging first year with no shortage of lessons learned, he was able to evaluate, adjust, and start realizing the benefits of leveraging prefabrication. Through his five-year journey, he found the components which helped him take prefabrication from failure to success were to:

• Incorporate the best people in the field to build the foundation
• Obtain upper management support to be able to innovate freely
• Combine the pre-fab and BIM teams to have strong collaboration
• And most importantly, do not be afraid to fail.

"Do not be afraid to fail. If you are close to giving up, you are closer to success than you think."

— Jared Christman

The Future of Prefabrication

After sharing his journey from where he started to where he is now, Jared wrapped up the discussion providing his insight into the future of prefabrication. He referenced augmented reality (AR) as a method we may start seeing for multi-trade applications as well as robotics in some form in the near future.