How are services coordinated between the factory and the site?
Services are the interface where a split contract usually fails. Every penetration in a module has to meet something already in the ground.
How are services coordinated between the factory and the site?
Service positions are fixed in the design documentation before either stream begins. Modules are built with penetrations and rough-in already installed, and site services are stubbed to matching positions, so the connection at installation is a joint rather than a redesign.
Ask where a modular project is most likely to go wrong and the honest answer is services.
Not structure, which is engineered and verified. Services, because they are the system that has to cross the boundary between two halves of the build that were made in different places at the same time.
Why it is the risk point
Every module leaves the factory with services already installed inside it. Pipework, cabling, drainage, and the penetrations they pass through.
Every one of those has to meet something on site that was built while the module was being built. Neither could be adjusted to suit the other, because neither existed when the other was made.
In a conventional programme, services are run after the structure is up, so they find their way around what is there. In a parallel programme they cannot.
How it is resolved
At design, not at installation.
Service positions are fixed in the documentation during the design stages, and both streams work from the same information. The factory builds penetrations and rough-in to the documented positions. The site stubs services up to the matching positions.
At installation, the connection is a joint. It is only a joint because the coordination happened months earlier.
What has to be decided early
Where every penetration sits, in three dimensions, not approximately.
How services pass between modules, which is the detail that determines whether a wall can be closed in the factory.
Where the connections to the site services occur, and what tolerance is provided at each one.
How the system is tested, and at what stage. Testing inside a module before it leaves the factory is far easier than testing it after it is installed, so as much as possible is proved before delivery.
The tolerance provision
Nothing is built to zero tolerance in the field. The design provides a deliberate allowance at the connection points, so a small variation in the foundation set-out or the module position does not become a services problem.
That allowance is designed rather than hoped for. It is the difference between a controlled interface and an improvised one.
Where the single contract earns its keep
In a split arrangement, the module supplier documented one position and the site contractor built another, and both can point to their own documentation.
When one business carries the design, the manufacture and the site works, the coordination is an internal responsibility. There is no commercial incentive for either side to defend a position, because there are no sides.
This is the least visible argument for single accountability and probably the strongest one, because services coordination is exactly the kind of problem that is cheap to prevent and expensive to resolve.
What an operator should ask
Whether services can be maintained without opening structure. Whether isolation points are accessible. Whether the as-built documentation records what was actually installed, module by module.
Factory production generates that record automatically, which makes the building easier to maintain for its whole life.
Discuss your project and we will map the services strategy.
MADEmodular / MADEbetter.
MADEmodular / MADEbetter.