This makes sure that the goals of quality, efficiency, suitability, productivity and sustainability inform every stage of the process.. By adopting a way of working that includes P-DfMA and a standard component design programme, we can achieve repeatable and consistent quality, and also facilitate operational and delivery excellence across projects.

This ‘manufacturing as a service’ could have significant benefits for a Platform approach to construction.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.However, she cautions that after owners demand the change, it’s important they’re involved in allowing people to change the process to decrease risk and make things possible.. Jaimie Johnston points out that people often want innovation, but they want it to be tried and tested, without extra risk.

They want a sophisticated way of delivering, but through an existing framework, an existing set of contracts, an existing set of contractual terms.. “No one doubts that you can deliver an asset using some of these technologies, he says, “but it's the framework of procurement methodology and contracts, and IP, and warranties and insurances - all those other things that need to change.”.“What I'm finding now,” says Amy Marks, “is that they love industrialised construction, they want to understand certainty, so they're starting to dictate and decouple the process of construction and productising it.”.

We need to connect makers and designers, she says.We need to look across everything we’ve built and find the consistencies.