For the seventh straight year the Epsilon team was front-and-center at the Hanson Wade Group Advancing Prefabrication Conference. This is the industry’s largest and longest-running prefabrication event and Epsilon’s Paul Kirchhoff was once again one of the speakers. Here are several takeaways from the team members who attended:
Partnerships was a constant theme throughout the conference. As long-time attendees we’ve observed a clear evolution of event dialogue – from “why” the industry should do more with prefab, to “how” to best to accomplish prefab methodologies and techniques. This year, the “how” was addressed through a consistent emphasis on partnering as a best practice.
Partnering is easily one of the most overused and/or misused terms in business. Fortunately, this year’s Advancing Prefab Conference cut through many of the typical cliches. Speakers highlighted how real partnering requires understanding the business goals of all parties, not just your own. It’s also critical to define what winning and losing looks like, and the importance of how understanding everyone’s goals facilitates collaboration.
We heard several variations of typical goals and priorities for evaluating an Off-Site Constructed (prefab / modular) approach:
- Owners want an end-product that is reliable and repeatable, without sacrificing design intent or long-term operability
- Constructors want risk management across the spectrum of a project: labor quality and availability, schedule surety, and cost certainty
- Prefab Modular builders want predictable plant loading, which requires the sort of collaboration that only happens through the open dialogue that comes with partnering
Clearly identifying priorities is one of the best ways to begin developing a working relationship that ultimately evolves into a partnership. As many of the speakers noted, it’s an approach that requires abandoning traditional roles the industry is accustomed to, based on rigid responsibilities (e.g., designers design, constructors build, and owners write the checks) and a shorter-term horizon (design – bid – hope for the best).
Continuing the partnership theme, Design Assist (DA) was a familiar topic throughout the conference. For instance, DA was identified as a key success factor in the prefab strategy employed by construction manager Whiting-Turner as they implemented hundreds of complex multi-trade racks and bathrooms pods for the UPMC Medical Center in Pittsburgh. Optimizing that prefabrication strategy could only have happened if the trade partners were engaged to collaborate in a way that only the DA process could facilitate.
Congratulations to the team at Hanson Wade for another fantastic event. We’re looking forward to seeing how 2026 shapes up! In the interim, reach out to Epsilon if you’re curious how your team and project might be impacted by optimizing modular prefabrication strategies.
