In today’s growing and competitive industrial market, fabrication needs to be completed quickly, efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively. The solution to keeping up with this demand is off-site modular fabrication.
Off-site modular fabrication is a process where the components for a project are fabricated away from the project’s jobsite in a more controlled environment.
In this blog, we explore five benefits of off-site modular fabrication.
Controlled Environment and Increased Safety
Shifting a significant portion of the build process into a fabrication facility with a controlled indoor environment has many obvious advantages, such as avoiding issues due to weather, available workforce, and safety.
For facilities at remote locations or in harsh environments, off-site modular fabrication offers fewer safety concerns. On-site work generally involves higher risk and safety issues than work in more controlled and consistent environments. For organizations that promote safety and aim for ‘zero incidents’ among workers, off-site modular fabrication supports the priority to improve safety.
For remote industrial facilities being built on-site, weather can greatly affect safety. In the Northern regions of North America, cold temperature, frozen ground and reduced daylight hours make for extremely difficult working conditions. Ice, snow, wind and reduced visibility can increase danger for workers, even when just walking around a site.
By moving work off-site into a fabrication facility, many safety risks associated with inclement weather are reduced or eliminated, especially during the winter months.
Pictured above – opting to have your modular components fabricated off-site means the environment is more controlled and issues due to weather, workforce or safety can be significantly reduced.
Better Productivity
In addition to the safety issues related to cold weather, harsh climates – combined with unfamiliar work environments – create conditions where it is difficult to be highly productive. The pace of work on-site becomes less predictable and is generally slower.
During construction on location, temporary crews often work under new supervision and need to handle different equipment in challenging surroundings. If the project is at a very remote site, long periods living away from home add to an unfamiliar daily rhythm. All of these conditions diminish a project’s overall productivity, increasing the time needed to complete work.
By contrast, many of these issues can be mitigated, or even eliminated, when modular fabrication is completed off-site in an established fabrication facility. Within controlled conditions that an off-site facility provides, the pace of work is more predictable and target completion dates are easier to meet.
Overall, good planning and coordination of both off-site and on-site construction processes – leveraging as much modularization as possible – can help to complete large-scale project in tough environments more safely and at a steadier, faster pace all year-round.
Reduced Construction Times
Pre-fabricated components for industrial projects are built primarily of large steel or specialty alloy components. Completed sections can be pre-assembled and pre-commissioned to integrate more building elements and create more dense components to reduce the amount, and difficulty of the final construction required on-site.
Fabricating multiple components simultaneously through off-site modular fabrication can increase coordination and speed-up scheduling. The off-site fabrication of major components can help to speed up total construction times on location. With more pre-fabricated modules planned, the timing of several components could further improve scheduling and help with project logistics.
By contracting one or several large fabrication facilities, multiple project sections or modules could be built off-site simultaneously, or in sequence, then shipped to the site for ‘just-in-time’ installation. Meanwhile, other construction work could be completed or prepared on location – such as foundations or site infrastructure.
The pre-assembly of more intricate elements, such as electrical wiring or piping can be completed at this time as well.
Reduced Total Installed Cost
Off-site modular fabrication doesn’t just save time, but can save you money as well. Off-site module fabrication can help to reduce total installed cost by reducing rental costs for cranes, site support equipment, worker facilities and staging costs. Completing modularization off-site in a facility where the potential for downtime is reduced can save critical dollars. The total installed cost is also reduced by the shortened length of production time enabled by modularization and simultaneous fabrication of components.
Be sure to consult your fabrication company early in the design process – consulting too late means incurring additional costs for integrating modular fabrication. Projects must be designed for a modular build to create worthwhile efficiencies early on for maximum cost-savings.
Pictured above is a module undergoing a test-fit. Test fitting ensure there are no unexpected issues once the module is transported to the jobsite.
Test-fitting
Test-fitting is a process completed at the off-site facility before shipping. It enables a fabricator to check how the modular components will fit when finally assembled on-site. This contributes dramatically to preventing unexpected issues, improving quality, and reducing the entire construction time on location.
Pre-test fitting for ‘plug and play’ precision on-site ensures custom fabricated modules fit together easily and precisely when they arrive on location – like Lego blocks – and can be constructed in many configurations and formats – to be placed side-by-side or stacked in multiple levels.
Saskarc has over 25 years of experience providing superior steel fabrication solutions achieved by combining project analysis, stakeholder communications and design innovation for modularization. See what our customers have to say about working with us and contact us today to learn more about how we can make your fabrication project a success by utilizing modularization.
