With a mission is to revolutionise construction and change the way houses are designed, manufactured, procured and built. COLAB and its DfMA Toolkit is providing several answers to the UK’s housing crisis.
COLAB is an interdisciplinary consortium of forward-thinking organisations at the cutting edge of innovation in the construction industry. Led by L&Q, alongside partners Virtual Viewing, HTA Design, and Hawkins\ Brown, the consortium was awarded funding by Government's Innovate UK under the ‘Transforming UK construction round 2: MMC, digital and whole-life performance’ competition to develop a digital solution addressing the key issues facing the construction industry.
The DfMA Toolkit is a digital application enabling housebuilders and their design teams to store portfolios of offsite manufactured products – from bathroom pods to house types – to source materials, capture in use data and inform decision making for future projects. Key to this is moving away from traditional project specific solutions to building homes, and towards a portfolio and product-based approach – adopting a manufacturing mentality.
As construction increasingly looks to technology for solutions that create efficiencies, the DfMA Toolkit can give stakeholders in our sector a better informed understanding of MMC and DfMA to enable them to take the right strategic decisions enabling change, transformation and innovation.
DfMA and MMC approaches can help speed up construction times whilst enabling the delivery of consistently high-quality homes. The DfMA Toolkit demonstrates how these methods can be used in practice to achieve tangible results. Features include a DfMA design guide to upskill the industry, an MMC product portfolio to store and manage offsite products, a mapping tool to identify and locate MMC suppliers and a business intelligence platform for metrics and analytics that advance DfMA and offsite adoption.
Launched in December 2021, the Toolkit has been a key step towards developing and adopting a standardised house type portfolio within L&Q. The team have been able to interrogate highly detailed 3D models by selecting desired configurations and features on individual house types.
This has increased the team’s understanding of the house type and the variations available on key elements of the house, which demonstrates the improvements being seen as a direct result of the Toolkit. It is estimated that wide adoption of the Toolkit could speed up design and construction programmes by 30%, providing total savings of around 25% to housebuilders. Toolkit stakeholders are working towards adopting it within their organisations, recognising the potential impact it can have on future projects, consolidating their own product portfolios and better understanding BIM data, golden thread potential and ways of displaying complex information digitally.
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