As manufacturing professionals in the building-products industry, you know the dilemma: your customers send completed designs that include building components that simply aren’t feasible given the project’s parameters. It’s not uncommon to receive requirements for balconies, staircases, doors, or other prefab components that are incompatible with your manufacturing capabilities. This leads to several iterations of helping your customers move from generic, but unverified components, to the specific products that will meet their project’s needs. But imagine how much more efficient this process could be if design teams could view your products’ specs during their earliest design work. If your customers could then determine in real time which components were a fit for their project and which weren’t feasible. You’d be giving your customers more lead time to do their work–and recovering valuable time for your own team. Designing with manufacturable products is an implementation of industrialized construction, a critical element of the future of the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) industry. Industrialized construction and productization will help the industry solve big challenges. For example, nearly 100,000 new affordable homes need to be built every day to house an estimated three billion people by 2030. The industry is also facing pressure to improve its sustainability, as construction is one of the most wasteful industries in the world. As building-products manufacturers, you play a critical role in realizing the future of our homes, workplaces, and communities. For the industry to keep pace, it’s imperative that we implement industrialized construction.

Connect design and make from day one

With Autodesk Informed Design, we are unlocking industrialized construction by connecting design and make from the earliest stages of a building project. Using new Informed Design features in Autodesk Inventor, your team can define your products–including detailed specs, options for customization, fabrication documentation, and product images–and add them to the Autodesk Platform to be used by your customers during design. Architects can also use Informed Design for Revit to design with increased certainty by specifying a product’s allowable dimensions, materials, finishes, and other information. Your customers can learn immediately whether the component they hope to design into their project fits the building parameters. If not, they can search for that component’s available options–to find a version with a smaller footprint, for example–until they find one that works. And as the manufacturer, you can build in guardrails to ensure your customers select only design options that are known to be manufacturable (based upon manufacturer specifications).