The finalised project, perfectly defined work units, planning by elements, and construction systems with implicit safety measures are key for the second largest decision-maker in the entire life cycle of a construction to have the courage to change its traditional processes for assemblies of pre-industrialised and prefabricated units. Labour shortages will force BAM to become the new way of building. And then robotics will follow….

The founder of building SMART, Patrick MacLeamy, predicted a decade ago that BIM would be joined by BAM in order to reach the BOOM. BAM stands for Building Assembly Manufacturing, i.e. assembling rather than building.

This industrialisation of construction entails understanding the processes from a totally different perspective to the current one. Perhaps we have seen some examples of industrialised housing, but now we are going to experience this industrialisation not only when we build a one-storey house, but also when we drive the process to build high-rise buildings?

In this case the variables used are different: how can the information contained in a digitised project be squeezed to obtain what a builder needs?

And then there are the collaborative methods that will require a different contracting model.

Making a single contract for all the agents involved breaks the traditional schemes where individual profit is what prevails.

The collaborative contract advocates understanding that at least three agents must be aligned: the developer, the architect and the builder. This multiplicity of «players» generates totally different inputs to what we are used to.

Their goal: to meet the budget and the deadline with a perfect construction.