Investing in Offsite Construction: 3 Easy Wins

This article is part of a series exploring the transformation of RNGD, a contractor with offices in Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama. RNGD evolved from a conventional general contractor to a "true builder," developing a strategic approach to achieve speed, quality and cost control simultaneously.

In 2023, RNGD took a huge step towards its longstanding mission to challenge the status quo in the construction industry. The contractor established a manufacturing facility in Metairie, Louisiana, that manufactures structural steel and cold-form steel elements. The decision gave RNGD the ability to independently construct and dry-in entire superstructures, which offered a transformative amount of control over efficiency, cost and quality while helping to overcome some of the industry’s historical inefficiencies related to supply chains, labor and planning. 

We asked Will Cotten, RNGD’s Innovation Leader, and Nick Moldaner, COO, to share wins from the early stages of implementing offsite manufacturing capabilities.

Will Cotten, Innovation Leader, RNGD

Nick Moldaner, Chief Operations Officer, RNGD

Win #1: Velocity Shift

Will: As we started to standardize products and components, we got really shrewd with data to create a positive feedback loop which speeds up the production completion duration and the design completion duration. We’re getting into cycle time analyses by the seconds or minutes, instead of by the workdays or the man hours. You just don't have that capability or bandwidth in a conventional field applied project type.

We find even more opportunities to get faster because we’re getting data on the back end of projects about how panels can be designed better to be installed faster. Rather than build a building, turn it over to a client and then it’s their problem after the warranty period and we don’t get any data or feedback, we’re actually learning from our buildings.

Nick: It’s a huge shift. The data suggests that inefficiency is just littered through the traditional delivery models. Everything from time constraints and handoffs, fee stacks, designers working in a silo, construction partners coming in late. There are many, many steps that are iterative and drawn out where you’re generally rallying separate groups of consultants to hopefully get to a point where you can break ground and actually build something.

The main difference with how we’re doing things is, when we get very early concepts, we bring everyone to the table. The field team, the people we’re buying materials from, the engineers, the project management team and the owners are all in the room for planning. With all those perspectives, we’re able to find every opportunity to reduce the fluff and get rid of wasted time and wasted money.

Will: It really makes a measurable difference, too. On a recent office project, we discovered that our longest station was waterproofing and we were missing planned production because, it turned out, we needed more coats of the fluid applied waterproofing to get the mill thickness we needed. We saw that as a tremendous opportunity to improve. We moved our waterproofing station from our largest bottleneck in the shop to the station that’s moving the fastest by finding a product where the waterproofing is actually integrated into the sheathing board. Now, we can get nearly eight panels fully finished and out the shop every day, versus a project before that where we were doing three and a half to four panels a day. So we doubled our production rate by just that one observation. 

Win #2: Morale Boost

Will: What we’re ultimately trying to do is make the lives of those in the field easier and better and have them feel like they’re participating in a cause that’s greater than themselves. And when a component that would normally take four different contractors to put together now shows up at the jobsite on the back of a trailer as a finished good, it’s a big culture and momentum shift to the jobsite.  

Nick: I’m thinking of a project in Huntsville — one of our first wins — that went off without a hitch. Trucks started showing up, panels came off and got installed. Fifteen days later, the building was dried in. After those 15 days, one of our senior superintendents calls and says, “I don’t want to do a project any other way moving forward.” He’s been in this industry for 35, maybe 40 years. For somebody who’s a veteran in the industry to give a genuine, heartfelt endorsement was amazing. 

Will: It impacts recruiting, too. The offsite manufacturing approach means we can attract people who want to work in this industry, but maybe don’t want to be in the sweltering heat or don’t have the ability to climb stairs and do more laborious tasks. In the shop environment, you're working on a level surface in an air-conditioned space that never rains out, so we’re offering a different environment that’s a lot more accessible to a broader audience.

Nick: I think what makes us different is the type of people we attract are those who are comfortable with change and those who desire change. You get a taste of it and you actually prefer to be in this more dynamic environment where we’re challenging things versus doing the same old thing. 

Win #3: Quick Delivery

Will: We like this model because it allows us to control things like supply chain, labor costs, material costs and quality speed. We’re seeing across projects we've done and the analyses we’re continuing to do for future builds that there’s a 30% schedule impact capability from when we break ground. 

The project in Huntsville was a five-story, 75,000-square-foot office building that used over 450 tons of steel. We dried-in the building in a matter of two and a half months. That process would normally take six months. So we saved four months off the critical path by taking the design-for-manufacturer approach in pre-construction, getting shop drawings done when construction documents are ready, starting fabrication, delivering it faster and installing it faster.

Nick: I think what makes us different is the type of people we attract are those who are comfortable with change and those who desire change. You get a taste of it and you actually prefer to be in this more dynamic environment where we’re challenging things versus doing the same old thing.  

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