How COfLOW Speeds up Construction through Innovative Systematization

Is the construction industry capable of radically improving its productivity and sustainability quickly? As I learned last Thursday at Solibri’s User Day, innovative project systemization can yield excellent results.

This User Day celebrated Solibri’s 25th anniversary and featured exciting customer presentations. One was Jan Lund‘s introduction to how COfLOW builds multi-family housing in the Helsinki metropolitan area at record speed.

Jan is the co-founder of the company, which has been around for just four years but has already achieved fantastic results.

Jan mentioned the three significant challenges of construction: quality, productivity, and CO2 emissions. His company aims to improve them through a systematized building process. COfFLOW has shown it can do it. It has successfully shortened construction time by 45%, cut emissions by 17%, and achieved coherent quality over its projects.

The principles, methods, and tools

What are the building blocks of this improved performance? Here are the ones I picked from Jan’s presentation.

Standardize

COfLOW repeats the same process on every project. They also use standardized design solutions and details.

Design for manufacturing and assembly

Jan emphasized that you should design the way you will build and not build before all the designs are complete. In design, they use the actual products, not generic equivalents. To achieve constructability, the company has subcontractors do virtual assembly that spots and fixes any issues in advance.

COfLOW synchronizes design with the procurement schedules.

Prefabricate

COfLOW speeds up construction using Lujabetoni’s precast concrete super slabs for floors and Flow Modules’ volumetric bathrooms.

Use BIM

The company utilizes BIM consistently for design, quantity takeoffs, and construction. Their projects employ a BIM coordinator to manage model quality. After project completion, COfLOW can hand over accurate as-built models to the owner.

Solibri is an essential tool for COfLOW, as Jan explained.

Employ the same partners across projects

COfLOW tries to use the same design and trade partners in all its projects. These partners know the contractor’s systematic way of building and can efficiently take on new projects.

Use Lean Construction

COfFLOW uses Takt production to program and manage work on the site accurately. Takt is a lean construction method that is gaining momentum in Finnish construction. It enables the radical shortening of construction production schedules, reducing the construction site’s CO2 emissions.

Another lean method the company practices is the Last Planner System. They organize weekly LPS meetings to plan tasks and monitor progress.

A production system

I was impressed by COfLOWs achievements so far. The company has successfully used existing methods and tools and innovatively combined them into a production system.

Systematization does not translate into monotonous products. Notably, none of COfFLOW’s projects look the same.