In today’s construction landscape, there is constant pressure to increase efficiency, manage costs and keep projects on schedule, all while ensuring safety and quality remain top priorities.
The demands aren’t new, but the strategies to meet them are evolving. One tried-and-true approach is prefabricated construction, also referred to as modular construction. While not a new concept, prefabrication has seen a real evolution in modern applications.
By shifting key construction activities offsite, prefabrication provides a smarter, more controlled way to build, delivering measurable advantages in speed, safety, quality and cost.
It doesn’t change what gets built, but how we build it.
Prefabrication can significantly compress the construction timeline by allowing multiple scopes of work to happen simultaneously. Instead of waiting for site readiness or battling trade congestion, entire systems — such as bathroom pods, wall panels, or MEP racks — can be assembled in a factory setting while other work progresses onsite.
For example, bathroom pods that might traditionally take weeks to frame, rough-in, tile and finish can be fully built offsite. They can then be shipped to the site when needed and installed in a matter of hours. That’s a game-changing shift in schedule certainty.
Other benefits that contribute to shortened schedules include:
And with time savings come cost efficiencies. Reducing general conditions, accelerating the project turnover, and minimizing rework all contribute to a leaner budget and earlier occupancy.
Prefabrication doesn’t just improve how fast we build; it improves how safely we build. By reducing the number of trades and tasks required onsite, it reduces risk. Fewer people, fewer moving parts and less congestion means a significantly lowered risk of an incident.
Meanwhile, work completed in offsite facilities benefits from:
Ultimately, prefabrication creates a cleaner, safer and more predictable construction environment, both onsite and off.
While the scale and scope of prefabrication can vary, nearly every project presents opportunities to benefit from it. In fact, we’re seeing prefabrication applied far beyond traditional uses like wall panels or electrical kits.
Modern construction is embracing an expanding list of systems and assemblies that can be prefabricated to support better project outcomes:
These applications have become foundational in many construction projects and offer clear schedule and labor advantages, especially in early-stage coordination and rough-in work:
These methods are relatively easy to integrate into most building types and offer a reliable way to reduce time onsite while improving consistency.
More recently, project teams are turning to complex prefabricated assemblies such as entire rooms or utility systems built offsite and delivered nearly complete.
These methods require more coordination but deliver significant gains in speed, safety and quality:
This blend of traditional and advanced prefabrication methods gives project teams the flexibility to select the right solution for each building type and phase. The key is early collaboration to identify these opportunities during design and preconstruction, when the impact is greatest.
By identifying components that can be built offsite early in the design phase, project teams can tailor prefabrication strategy.
“We’re always looking for ways to provide greater value to our clients by delivering projects that exceed expectations for quality, safety, schedule and cost and prefabrication is an important way we do that.”
-Andrew Miller, Project Executive
The Christman Company