MUNICH (dpa-AFX) – According to construction experts, residential buildings can be built significantly faster and at a significantly lower cost using a more industrialized construction method. The lever for this will be building in series with prefabricated components and digital process optimization, according to a study by strategy consultants EY-Parthenon and the Baywa Group, which was made available to dpa on Sunday.
“The building of the future must become much more digital, standardized and therefore cost-efficient,” says BayWa manager Steffen Mechter. “By planning and building every building from scratch, as we do now, we are wasting existing resources.”
Hardly any other industry is subject to such strict legal requirements as the German construction industry, he says. In addition, he says, many actors and trades are involved in a construction project, and almost every building is a one-off individual. According to the study, the most effective lever for greater productivity is industrial prefabrication.
If the work steps are moved from the construction site to a factory and the components are created there automatically, the construction becomes less dependent on the weather, easier and faster. This varies from the use of pre-assembled modules to fully equipped room modules including technical equipment. In the case of an apartment building with 25 apartments, for example, 15 percent of costs can be saved this way, said Björn Reineke, management consultant at EY-Parthenon. Shifting some of the added value to the factory floor could reduce construction time by 30 percent, he added.
Subsequent adjustments to plans often lead to a new need for coordination between trades, delays and additional costs. Better planning with digital process optimization can speed up construction by several months and significantly reduce overall costs when building apartment buildings.
The third lever, he said, is to build single-family or multi-family homes in a series development. Individual deviations are only possible to a certain extent. The planning effort is lower, the purchase of large quantities of materials cheaper, said strategy consultant Reineke./rol/DP/he
