As a non-engineer, I am blown away by how fast things are changing in building offsite factories. Digital engineering alone is gathering speed almost to the point of having to read what is new every single day.
Integrated factory modeling combines BIM and digital factory planning to generate a digital representation of production facilities and equipment. Multi-disciplinary project contributors can collaborate in this central, always-up-to-date model to plan, design, validate, build, and operate factories.
Fast-moving changes in products, materials and process technologies require factory planning processes and procedures to be flexible and dynamic. Today, most factory planning projects are missing their budget (72%) and time targets (60%).
To reduce these deviations, digitalization is key to success, but in current approaches, coordination between different planning disciplines is missing as well as different technology maturity levels prohibit automated interfaces.
The Integrated Factory Modelling (IFM) is an interdisciplinary planning approach for Green (new factories built from the ground up) – and Brownfield factories (repurposing closed buildings) coordinating all planning disciplines from infrastructure to process planning across the factory lifecycle.
Therefore, the Integrated Factory Model (IFM) as a single dataset is established for all planning participants, accessible everywhere and on every device. Collaboration is enhanced by the working mode with an agile factory scrum process. Based on the IFM user-specific smart expert tools have been developed supporting planners and managers.
Gary Fleisher is the Editor in Chief of Modular Home Source and Offsite Builder. Email at [email protected]
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