Forma Homes
Prefabricated Building Systems - Faster Completion, Better Quality, Lower Cost
The basic process of constructing a home in the United States has not changed substantially in over 100 years, with the exception for the manufacturing of roof trusses. Unlike almost every other manufacturing and fabrication industry, the home building sector continues to rely almost entirely on manual labor.
In North America, we are now dealing with the challenges of higher labor costs, labor shortages and a consumer demand for better quality. With the introduction of the JD Power and Associates customer satisfaction ratings of major builders, as well as increased consumer litigation, the quality and consistency of new homes has become one of the top priorities in the new home industry.
These issues came to a head 15-20 years ago in Scandinavia, forcing the Swedes to begin exploring automation as a means of meeting these challenges. In Northern Europe, the short building season, increasing labor costs, demanding consumers and extreme governmental regulatory pressure a highly automated solution known as the Swedish System.
Today, the Swedish System dominates the marketplace in Scandinavia, Northern Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom. Leading home builders in the U.K. and Ireland are producing large numbers of homes in a single plant (6,000 homes per year at one U.K. plant and 3,000 in another plant in Ireland). Recently, the concept was brought to the United States by Toll Brothers in Pennsylvania.
The additional benefits of prefabrication were confirmed with the "Framing the American Dream" demonstration, which was a joint project of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the Wood Truss Council (WTC). The project involved building two identical 2,600-square-foot homes, one stick-frame and the other panelized prefab. The panelized home saved 26 hours of framing time and 1,109 board feet of lumber. Builders in the field, on actual jobs, have experienced even more dramatic results. Recently, a 6,000-square-foot custom home had all the panels set and the roof sheathed in three weeks, using the panelized-prefab version of the Swedish System.
Using the panelized approach to produce a prefabricated structure allows for any new home design, eliminating the modular-building requirement of selecting a pre-engineered plan from a catalogue. Manufacturing of building panels starts with analyzing the CAD plans. This ensures the quality and integrity of design before a single stud has been nailed. The structure is divided into a series of panels (one or more per wall or floor section), with detailed specifications allowing for precise
The Swedish System (invented by Burmek-Sweden) exports the CAD plan to CAM (computer-aided manufacture) instructions that run a highly automated assembly line, which produces each panel. It takes only 10 minutes to produce a 30-foot exterior wall (exact to within a millimeter of tolerance), complete with studs, sheathing, insulation and windows.
Panelization allows the builder to deliver an assembled, closed-in framed home in one-quarter to one-half the time needed for traditional stick-built construction, while saving labor, time and project loan inter- est. The factory-manufactured product reduces the need for on-site skilled labor, improves coordination of trade contractors and reduces the number of customer service requests.
Finally, a framing cost savings of 10-30 percent can be achieved, as compared to stick-frame construction. Better quality, faster delivery and lower cost: what is not to like? There is no doubt, we will see an ever-increasing use of panelized construction in the future.
June 2005 Builder Architect Edition Issue