| > Construction is an efficient business It doesn’t feel very efficient, especially residential construction. My neighbor is building a garage with some finished space above. It’s sat without a garage door for literally months now - everything else is done. I often wonder how soon into the project was the garage door ordered and how was that order tracked? Was the lead time calculated and a fallback option presented? These are things that we just take as a matter of course in software. They are also routine in industries that are software-intensive (finance, insurance, retail, to a lesser extent logistics) The construction business - especially residential construction and remodeling - seem insanely inefficient to me. Jobs that should take a few days of wall clock time often take weeks due to poor planning and scheduling. It’s interesting that certain high value specialties within construction end up being extremely efficient. You can get a new HVAC system (assuming that you don’t need to install ductwork) in a couple of days. Ditto for a new roof or a new driveway. The process is finely tuned. It would be wonderful to have the ability to apply computational power to jobs that are not as repeatable today. Scan the house and identify constraints. Automatically design the systems, measurements and layout and assemble a BOM to minimize the effects of supplier lead times. Submit detailed RFPs to subcontractors and track their performance to plan. Etc. |
If all you have to improve the construction industry is better scheduling and supply-chain management, that's something. But the poster above seemed to be hinting at things more like new construction techniques.