The Construction Playbook.
When trying to accelerate a product to market, it’s important not to tie things down too early.Unexpected things often happen in development, which affect the outcome.
It’s important to stay flexible.Using Chips enabled the success of the Parma project, and structural modelling also enabled design simplification and a quicker timescale.The project was completed in just 18 months and awarded ISPE facility of the year.. We also successfully created something we called a Factory in a Box pharmaceutical facility.
It was built with eight Ghurkas from components delivered in shipping containers.The Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) project answered an important question for large companies wondering how to build high-quality facilities in emerging markets, quickly and efficiently, with varied local capability.
It also addressed the desire to use that investment to improve skills and capabilities in the local area.
The answer was to use components which were readily available in the supply chain, and bring them together in a simple but clever way.In addition, the mathematical modelling and simulation tools (including process simulation models) can then be used to test the proposed manufacturing process and production options, providing stakeholders with more information to make better informed decisions.. Construction automation case study: the fabrication process.
The factory takes square hollow section steel and plate steel as raw materials and fabricates different types of painted trusses.Using expected market demand as well as the ongoing truss system designs, a process flow for fabrication was developed with initial layouts for arrangement and quantities of equipment.
Most of this process is to be automated with some manual intervention for transport, quality assurance and painting; processes where automated stations are unnecessary or significantly expensive against provided benefit.. To provide a better understanding of the system, we built a time-based discrete event model to represent the process and provide key outputs for various sets of input parameters.This allows the designers and stakeholders at an initial planning stage to see, digitally, how their assets could perform during production and provide feedback during the project at the earliest opportunities where large changes can be made to maximise value.. For the purposes of this project, operations upstream of raw material addition, and operations downstream of the final truss painting, were excluded from the simulation.