Ask a precast plant manager what he wants from a design office. Sooner or later you get the same answer: tell me what you are going to order before you order it. That sounds like a modest request. It rarely happens. A factory pricing a residential scheme is usually quoting elements it has never made…
Poland built almost its entire postwar housing stock out of precast concrete panels. By the end of the 1980s, the country had built close to 4 million homes this way. Today around 60,000 of these buildings are still standing. Roughly 12 million people live in them, close to a third of the country’s population. This…
People throw around the term DfMA in precast concrete without always explaining what it entails. Strip away the acronym and one question remains: does the design work in a mould, on a trailer and on the end of a crane hook, not just on paper? That question sounds obvious. In my experience, most designs skip…
I have spent over two decades inside precast manufacturing, and there is a conversation I keep having with manufacturers. It runs like this. We invested in better formwork, faster curing, and automated rebar tying. We cut our production cycle times. But the project still ran late, the margin was still thin, and the client was…
Walk into most precast plants, and you will see beds full, cranes moving, crews working, and very little standing idle. The yard is stacked. Every machine has something on it. To anyone managing the operation, this looks like success. A busy plant feels productive. I have spent over twenty years inside these operations, and I…
Over the past decade, volumetric modular construction looked like the answer to Britain’s housing shortage. Whole homes, or close to it, came out of factories. They went up faster than site-built work, they were made to tight tolerances, and the work was cleaner. Investors backed it heavily. The government supported it through Homes England. Trade…
I spent over two decades inside precast manufacturing. I watched smart people work incredibly hard, and I watched projects bleed margin in entirely preventable ways. The common thread, almost every time, was that we were applying manufacturing logic to a process still rooted in craft-era thinking. This post isn’t about bashing the construction industry. It’s…
Most teams that run into trouble on precast projects make the same mistake at the start: they treat the switch to precast as a specification change. Update the drawings, adjust the programme, and keep the same structural grid. Job done. It isn’t job done. The two systems behave differently at a structural level. If that’s…
Precast concrete is often discussed as though it belongs to the digital age. In reality, its origins stretch back nearly two thousand years. Understanding that history helps explain why the method has lasted so long, and where it fits in construction today. The Romans and the Origins of Precast Thinking The ancient Romans did not…
A Manufacturing Execution System, or MES, is a real-time software platform that monitors, tracks, and controls manufacturing processes from raw materials through to the finished product. It connects enterprise planning tools, such as an ERP, to what actually happens on the factory floor. The core job of an MES is to keep production accurate, efficient,…
