These ideas and discussions are vital to the safe development of AI in pursuit of the betterment of all people and the planet but they hold absolutely true for human organisations..
What can we learn?.Xometry uses a widely distributed network of suppliers who can respond to requests which suit their capabilities and capacity.
This would be a positive outcome for construction, ensuring those suppliers who were local to a planned project could respond, reducing travel distance and therefore carbon, risk of delivery delays etc..This distribution helps manufacturers to maximise their utilisation; downtime on equipment and operatives contributes to overhead, which is amortised across orders, raising prices and lowering productivity.Having easy access to long term pipeline (as advocated in the Construction Playbook) will of course help ensure there is less downtime.
But being able to use down time to manufacture ‘short’ orders or contribute to a larger order (the consistent specifications making products from different suppliers fungible) will also help increase utilisation and productivity, reducing prices;.It creates a more direct link between global organisations such as those listed above, and manufacturers.
This is a link which rarely exists in construction, where there are typically numerous tiers between the client and manufacturers, introducing enormous economic ‘friction’ and transactional cost.
Manufacturers are pre-qualified to relevant standards (such as ISO 9001, but also to specialist medical, aerospace and defence standards including ISO 13485, AS 9100, NADCAP and ITAR).And you multiply those exponentially.
It's too many.”.Creating an opportunity: prefabrication and productisation in construction.
The problem we’re currently facing, Marks says, is that “we're only talking about the baby steps of prefabrication, or really fabrication, at this point.We're not enabling productisation.