Unlocking the World of Industrialized Construction

OLLIE GREEN: Thanks for tuning in to our recording and coming over to our class. Before we get going, I'm just going to briefly plug this debate about who we are and what we do. So we produce something called KOPE, which is essentially software for industrialized construction or offsite construction, and we're going to be telling you more about that later on in the talk. And also, excitingly for us, we're going to be showing it publicly for the first time. It's been on the down low for a while, and finally, we're going to bring it out to the light.

So about ourselves-- my name is Ollie, and I'm a product manager at KOPE. I was an architect, and I was also a software developer back in the day, and these days, early developments, MMC Market, which again, we'll be covering in a bit.

DAVID FLYNN: My name is David. I'm one of the co-founders of KOPE, and my background is mostly in architecture technology and BIM.

OLLIE GREEN: So I'm going to briefly just give you an idea of what we're going to cover in the talk. So this session starts with a short recap of challenges and just contemporary construction in the UK. They're kind of UK-specific, but actually, a lot of the lessons are very much applicable to many different countries, including the US. I'm going to set the scene, but I'm not going to dwell too long on the mess that we're facing.

Then I'm going to talk about how the construction industry has really responded. It's shifted the way that it's been working, or it's beginning to shift towards an industrialized construction approach, which is probably the most profound change in the way we've built, maybe ever. So remember the two words, industrialized construction, because we think you're going to be hearing a lot more of them in the future.

After this, I plan to take you on a bit of a tour of the new industrialized landscape through the lens of an industry tool that we've been developing which is MMC Market. We've also made this freely available. So at any point in the talk, you should be able to log in and have a play. Finally, I'm going to pass you over to my co-presenter, David, who's got a glimpse of this new way of working in the industrialized construction world and what it means for property developers and software people, designers.

So to kick off, we want to talk about the crisis we're facing, pretty much in traditional construction, how we're finding opportunity to move construction forward using technology. And we've been seeing kind of a feedback loop happening where real world conditions are driving change in the construction industry.

The industry is responding to these changes. It's changing the way that it produces buildings. It produces new kinds of buildings, and that changes the real world conditions. So it's a bit of a loop, we're seeing.

I'm just going to recap on basically the big highlights now, how we wound up in the predicament we're in. So how we got here-- UK construction has been pretty desperate, quietly desperate for a few years. We can't pretend that things were always rosy beforehand.

But we can trace the roots back of our current mess to 2016, June, when the country voted to leave the European Union. And no matter what your politics are on that issue, what this did is it introduced a lot of uncertainty about who would be able to live, stay, and work in the UK, and how we'll be able to get talent to the industry, both for onsite talent and offsite.

Just a few months later in October, there was a huge government study. The outcome of it was published. So it had been commissioned years earlier, and this landed in October. It's called "The Farmer Review," and everyone tends to know it by its subtitle, which is "Modernize or Die."

And as you can guess, this report didn't really pull any punches. It was a huge wake-up call to the industry. And it found quite concerning evidence the UK's construction sector workforce was already very old. It was in the process a great retirement, and we're not replenishing the workforce in the younger end anywhere near fast enough. So it warned us that we were going to find a lot of difficulty in sourcing construction workers for projects and had a lot of recommendations on how we could take immediate action to try and counteract that.

I've got a US statistic for you. The US National Center for Construction Education and Research predicts that 41% of the current US construction workforce is going to retire by 2031. So in short, both here and in the UK, plan A is no longer really an option. We can't keep throwing construction talent at projects. We have to rethink how we're going to construct in the future.

And just seven months later in May was the Grenfell Tower fire. So the original tower you can see on the left was reclad in a low-cost and ultimately flammable facade cladding. A fire did break out in one of the flats, and that's caused 72 people to lose their lives. So as you can imagine, this has been a national tragedy in the UK, and this has led to a top-to-bottom review of building standards and safety standards in the country.

Five years later-- so in this May just gone-- the government published the Building Safety Act. It's received royal assent, so it's become law. And it has an exceptionally strict set of regulatory requirements for the construction industry that we're still trying to digest and take on board.

Fast forward to January 2020, and we pretty much just signed the Brexit deal, and then our next set of problems arrived. And you can kind of guess what this one is going to be about. So we had coronavirus, and everyone's spending their time at home. Everyone's doing retrofit renovation projects, and basically demand for construction materials skyrocketed. So with all the demand and the hugely restricted supply chains due to COVID, the cost of construction materials absolutely ballooned and several forms of construction, which have no longer really been commercially viable.

The same strain supply chains have been suffering from the war in Ukraine and also the zero COVID lockdowns in China, which continue to happen. So this isn't getting easier any point soon. And all of this ultimately has happened against the backdrop of increasingly tight environmental standards.

So our industry is trying very hard to reduce both its embodied and its carbon in operation. You can see on the graph on the left, the United Kingdom's carbon emissions have been sinking year on year. But just last month with the UK's hottest ever day on record, which is 40 degrees-- in old money, it's 105 Fahrenheit for you guys. But you've got to remember we're north of every major city in Canada. So this is pretty hot for us, and we're not used to that.

And we also have to remember that this is an industry which, in the good old days before 2016 and everything else, still had pretty profound difficulties with sticking to construction cost limitations, schedules, or giving any kind of transparency into its supply chain, its markets, its pricing models. Things weren't always rosy, even before then.

So the graph on the left-- and on the right even-- did the rounds a few years ago. I think everybody remembers it, but it's a kind of sobering reminder that construction is one of the least digitized industries in the world out of all of the industries. And we're even behind agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting. So we do have a huge opportunity to use tech to drive us forward. We've just got to seize it.

So business as usual is steeped in crises of our own making as an industry. And basically, as our outdated ways of building continue to show their age, there's a rapidly growing demand for a more modern construction industry, one that's using technology and doesn't just solve today's problems, but also unlocks the opportunities for the future. So we're hoping to explore those new opportunities in the year ahead.

So what am I saying? I'm saying the familiar question is, can we use technology in some way to save us from the hole we've gotten ourselves in? And the very clever folks at McKinsey seem to think, possibly. They've published a bunch of very influential sector-wide reports with a notable recent emphasis on construction platforms online and in modular construction. And I, for one, am biased, but I do think they're right.

And we are seeing the first signs that the UK construction industry is undergoing a kind of metamorphosis. So from precast concrete facades to bathroom pods, more and more types of buildings are being partially constructed offsite and in factories. And what's taking shape as a new industrially-driven methodology for building, one that's being informed by manufacturing processes and which speaks of construction in terms of products and not one of projects. So if you take any idea away from this talk, it's this one, it's buildings being products and not projects.

So there are a lot of overlapping terms in this space, and I think you might be familiar with a few of them. So the UK, we like to use MMC, which is Modern Methods of Construction. And it can largely be analogized to the US. We like saying industrialized construction quite a bit.

And there's a few terms which are global. So I only found this out while putting the presentation together, but the third flag is the flag of planet Earth. So these are some old global terms, things like modular. DFMA, Design for Manufacturing Assembly, really comes from the manufacturing world, not traditionally from construction. But we're beginning to adopt it as a way of designing for these manufacturing processes.

Prefab-- it's a bit an old term that is doing the rounds. Offsite construction is, again, an umbrella term, and it's pretty closely aligned to what we mean. And finally, kit of parts is a bit like you get your LEGO kit of parts for a building, put them together in the very sensible flexible systems, which means you can use very few parts to construct a pretty impressive building.

So one of the original kit of part buildings was the Crystal Palace in the UK, done for the Great Exhibition in, I want to say, the 1850s. And it used a very, very minimal kit of, I believe, iron parts that could be assembled in a bunch of ways to produce a pretty breathtaking Victorian glazed building.

And both the UK and the USA have a bit of a historic distaste for some of these [INAUDIBLE]. We've got trailer parks and projects in the US, prefab homes in the UK, and we picture these dilapidated sort of concrete prefab towers. And I think in many ways, we still do feel the cultural scar tissue from these. And to some extent, these post-war buildings were actually enormously successful in that we're able to produce them on a very low budget, very rapidly, and they've lasted for decades longer than they were ever meant to last.

However, they're not the hottest things in construction these days, and they're not the kind of building that we're looking to talk about today. Instead, I just want to focus on the big ideas that are behind them. You've probably heard someone say before, what if we built buildings and factories the same way that we build cars? At this point, if you're in the sector, it's a legal requirement for you start talking about the Ford Model T, the Toyota production system, and maybe even Berlin or Texas gigafactories and Tesla.

So buildings as standardized designs, systems with built-in flexibility and customization options, these are the big ideas. The benefits of this could potentially be huge-- huge increases in the sort of material and process efficiency; a lot more predictability when it comes to predicting cost of the construction program for one or even hundreds of homes; far better quality; and more accessible working conditions that are better suited to the people working there, which could open up opportunities for stable employment instead of essentially firing everyone every time the building is finished; and also allowing for hugely robust testing and performance standards, which are going to help make buildings ultimately cheaper, easier to insure.

Coming off the back of the testing, as well, we should be able to refine construction details, which will allow us to carry out long-term R&D projects that are going to lead to more and more innovation, what windows can do, what doors can do. So instead of losing all knowledge every time we shut down a project, what happens if we can build up that knowledge and refine our process over years, decades, literally lifetimes, as it happened with the aerospace and the automotive sectors? And this is what we do for another kind of manufacturing. And I think you've probably heard the slogan before-- it's actually very similar to the Autodesk ethos to do more and to do it better and to ultimately use less and give the planet a break.

And if you're thinking you've heard this before, you're not wrong. Of course, you have. You're right. The big ideas of industrialized housing, productization, developing a kind of kit of parts, these are actually ridiculously ancient. And a lot of the key thinking behind this comes from, first of all, from military, and it comes from hundreds of years ago.

So we can learn from the failures of these kinds of brave revolutionary attempts at solving housing, and they are very well-documented. And we would be foolish to think that we are smarter in some way than the people who come before us [INAUDIBLE]. And Katerra even had the benefits of modern software and modern industrial technology to boot.

So what's different this time? Basically, like I said earlier, plan A is rapidly and irreversibly going out of the window. Construction sector is a demographic time bomb, and there isn't really any way we can reverse this. So the graph on the left shows a lot of UK-born construction workers are set to retire. They're nearing their mid to late 50s. And that big lump on the graph is, they're going to retire in the next 10 years.

And it's already begun, to an extent. We're seeing an enormous amount of retirement at more or less that age group, and there's no one coming in and replenishing the industry from the other side. So we believe this is the final straw. Plan A is over. If we wish to continue building at all, we are going to need to adopt some kind of industrialized construction methods.

And our company has been operating in this space for years, working alongside some of the most exciting names in modular construction. And one of the reasons we've been able to do that is because the UK is actually one of the most innovative countries in the world when it comes to offsite construction. And while offsite on the continent largely focuses on kind of low rise, one- to two-story timber-built single family housing, the UK is highly constrained in terms of space, and that drives up the value of land.

So we're exploring some slightly more interesting options where we're taking modular to new heights. At 50 stories, the UK's tallest modular tower is being built. It's topped out already in Croydon right now. And we were just granted planning permission to a tower that's going to be even taller, so branding ourselves the offsite island of the top 10 modular towers in the world.

The tallest, I think five of them are in the UK, and we've currently got an ongoing rivalry with Singapore. US, you are not forgotten, you are there at 359 feet at Dean Street-- I believe it's in New York, completed in 2016. But you've got some catching up to do. Sorry to bring you the bad news.

So last December, I was given the opportunity to spend two full months researching the offsite sector in the UK and consolidate years and years of built-up research that we've gotten from working in the space, trying to answer key questions. Who are the people out there; who builds what; where are the factories; who funds them; who's insuring them; what award are they winning, and who's giving them, et cetera, et cetera.

So we wound up with a gigantic, interconnected Airtable full of rich and very actionable useful data. And in showing this to some of our partners, people started asking us for, access, like, hey, can I take a look at that data? Can I get a copy? Or, hey, what does your big mega database say about this or that?

And that's, I think, when the penny drops for us that we realized there was a big-data shaped hole in the UK's offsite construction sector. And despite years of pushing and support from the UK government, there was basically no visibility into the supply chains of the construction ecosystem.

It was just completely opaque. All you had was Google. And we know this problem before. We're in tech. And this is what you call a marketplace problem.

On one side, you've got manufacturers and suppliers who are trying desperately to be seen and increase their visibility in the space. And on the other side, you've got contractors and architects putting together buildings, who are trying to research the sector and to see what's out there and to compare and basically try and find the right solutions for their projects. And we knew that all we had to do was build an online place to bring them together and give them the visibility they wanted. So we built the MMC Market.

So in researching, basically, the offsite construction data that existed already, we found a few different offerings. Some of them were paid-for systems, some of them were genuine attempts to open and democratize information. Other people that had the same idea as we have, of course, but none of them had really been a huge success.

And as we tried them out, we identified six key problems that we felt were holding these systems back. And we set out to build a new free, open online service to finally serve the industry and to solve all six of these problems for good. And in doing this, we partnered with the cost consultancy, the original authors of "The Farmer Report" or the "Modernize or Die" report that we'd heard about earlier. So we got all the benefits of their industry expertise, as well.

And here are some examples of what we found. Just going back to the six points on the previous page, we found that no oversight of the data leads to trash data. It's disorganized, and it's hard to navigate your way around.

So for instance, the country here, people were able to add in their own country, and some added in blank as a country. Europe, despite popular belief, isn't actually a country, but a whole kind of continent almost. The UK is a country but UK Turkey Germany Russia isn't one particular country.

There were registration rules, which you had opaque-- it wasn't really easy to figure out how you'd register. You actually had to find a special email address and ask for access. So again, that's a barrier to entry.

Some of them had paywalls. One of the most popular listings in the UK for offsite sector charges every company 500 pounds for a listing, even though it might cost them a pound in data charges a year. And then if you want to put your projects up there, it's 200 pounds per project. So you're forking out to go on a Yellow Pages, essentially.

There is an issue with software development knowledge and trust. So often, legitimate pieces of offsite software would be presented to you as a virus by Windows, which, even though they're not, it's going to turn a lot of people away from your solution. Low quality user experience where you have maps that are essentially unreadable and low quality data where these technologies, even though they are legitimate offsite construction technologies, aren't really structured or presented in a clear way or even a legible way in many cases.

So we found a lot of issues, and we wanted to find a way to fix them. And we faced a ton of challenges. One thing off the bat that you realized is you need a ton of high quality data. And this means you need to know the space that you're operating in.

You need to know the special terminology that they use and basically embody the hopes and fears of the people who are working in that space. And this pretty much means you have to do a lot of manual research and have some very highly structured data. And that is-- it's work. It's a slog.

You then have to strategically create data models that you know are going to scale. And this is harder than it sounds because you have to check every assumption that you thought you knew. And for instance, we had a certification database, that we had an expiry date for certifications.

And then you realize not every kind of certification actually expires, so something that we assumed done to assume in the end, and now we've had to go back and fix. So you have to really embody the way the construction sector really works using your data models. And this is a trial and error kind of process.

Thirdly, you need to make a big effort to gain the trust of users. So your website, first of all, can't be buggy. It can't pretend to be a virus or something. And you're going to really need to show that you've got the key players in the space at the start.

And then you want to show their accreditations. You want to be clear about where the data is coming from and who's gone ahead and verified the data and who hasn't. Trust is hugely important.

And one thing I found in the past is selling a piece of free software is actually much harder than selling something that costs $5. People are rightfully suspicious. They want to know what the catch is and how are they really paying for the service you're putting out there.

Then you need an audience. And this takes a lot of concerted effort to cultivate an intended audience, build up a social media following, and get people hearing and speaking about what you're ideally spreading by the word of mouth. Taking industry buy-in is hard work. And you've got to approach the major trade bodies, the warranty providers, and if you can, even government departments to try and get buy-in, get people promoting your product for you and building up a momentum for you.

You've got to remove all the user experience friction as much as possible. So one thing you'll notice if you go on to MMC.market now is there's no cookie banners. Because we don't use cookies, because ultimately everyone's sick and tired of closing them.

We don't run ads. We don't have paywalls. We don't have registration rules. It's like Google. You turn up, type it in, you use it, you can go away. We're not hiding any of the data behind premium features or anything. We're not using confusing terminology. And we're not trying to bombard you with text, because busy people don't read.

Keep the text to a minimum. Use images which are worth a thousand words whenever you can, and just reduce the cognitive load. Because everyone browsing any website is probably constantly distracted. You've got to factor that in.

One thing we found is that we designed a registration process with all of these ideas in mind, with robust data validation and clear messaging if someone got something wrong. And this reduces the likelihood of user error and increases our chance of getting high quality data when people do sign up to use our website.

Even then, we manually check everything with industry experts on our team. So we look at every new person who registers every project to make sure it sounds like it makes sense. If it doesn't, we'll either reject the submission, or we'll get in touch to try and clarify what's really going on.

Finally, you want to create a sticky experience. So this means people keep coming back to your market. It's not just a Yellow Page they open for five minutes once a month and then close. It's actually more than that, it's an experience.

You listen to feedback from your audience, try and draw out the insights from them and plan new features which build up value on top of what you've built already. So it can start off as a market, but what happens if it becomes a blog with publications and user insights and resource pages? It can grow. And if all goes well, you've created a new and useful tool for the industry.

So six months later, we started building this at the start of the year. We've managed to get nearly 200 suppliers on the website with 151 factory locations. We've got an above 70 consultants registered and above 100 projects signed up. And those are all interlinked that data.

So a project will have the architects who've worked on it, the developers. It'll have the consultants. But it will also have the different companies and what they manufacture. Where it is, you've got location-based search for everything, easy sourcing, filtering tools. So hopefully, we can give the benefit of all this rich, interconnected, and verified data to anyone in the industry. And if you've done it right, you'd help move construction just a little bit down that path into the future.

And as we've been running the website, people have started asking us to host information about their products. MMC Market is run currently as an organization-level database. So we don't actually go down to the detail of the different products people use. Product level things are actually a lot more complicated, because you've got to embody all this different kind of metadata for sorting and filtering the different kind of products might have.

And also, offsite products aren't really like regular construction products. They're actually a little bit special. So here are some examples on the screen. We've got the volumetric pods people are probably familiar with, [INAUDIBLE] CLT or 2D floor cassettes to mini pods, bathroom pods, and kitchen pods or even preassembled MEP units. There's actually a huge variety of offsite construction approaches that we're trying to embody.

So we generally try and split construction products into three broad types. So you've got the ones that are bought on the left. They're already designed, and they've probably been manufactured ahead of demand. They're probably sat in a warehouse somewhere gathering dust right now. They're done. Those aren't the kind of things we're interested in.

Then there are the kind of products which are the result of a design system. So they come with some kind of inbuilt flexibility, a bit like bathroom pods. There's a design system behind them. They can be flexed around key dimensions, and they can have different material finishes that can be hot swapped so the user can kind of pick from. But that's it. It's kind of like variations on a theme, ultimately.

And finally, you've got the kind of construction systems that are always made to order. They have their own internal embedded logic about how far they can span or the gaps between studs or concrete floor planks or cassettes. Their parameters can't be captured precisely or defined beforehand. Instead, these are done custom to a project. And they're often driven by geometric-based information such as a grid or an outline of a flow plate with cut-outs, trims, or rises and things.

And those are the ones we're calling computed. So we've got bought, configured, and computed, very different ends of the spectrum. And with offsite construction, with offsite with KOPE, we're not really concerned too much with bought. We're looking more at the configured and the computed approaches to construction.

So I've said, offsite construction systems, they're generally made to order. Instead of a fixed design, you're looking more at a design system. This really means they're parametric in nature. And that leaves us with a very tricky question-- how do you go about building an online marketplace for parametric systems? The best example I can think of is the Nike Online Trainer configurator, where you can choose from different makes and models and trainers, spin them around in the website, and actually switch out different colors and materials for different parts.

So how do you build a marketplace of user configured systems? It's a really tricky technical offering. You have to give your users the ability to flexibly configure different sort of construction systems on the fly in their browser, get back metrics, and calculate costs. And for that, you're going to need some kind of giant parametric computation engine running in the background. So fortunately for us, we actually already have one.

DAVID FLYNN: Thanks, Ollie. Well, I'll discuss that computation engine that we have in the background now. So basically, what Ollie's kind of walked us through is the fact that we have a significant level of product on the market, and we have lots of variation in relation to those products. And what we want to be able to do is offer you a way to flex them and then actually apply them to your product.

So what we're kind of excited about here is the ability to be able to apply directly any of your offsite products directly to your project design files. We're very conscious of the fact that there's been a history of lots of big libraries of digital content there. They've been floating around for a long time. And what we want to be able to do is to move away from static libraries and have content waiting for a manual process of application, and then for us to be able to actually be able to configure explore and apply all of that content directly onto projects.

So what we've been able to do and what Ollie's covered us off of today is the fact that we have two major aspects of what we're trying to build here at the moment. So the first part of that is the Marketplace. The Marketplace in the MMC Market is basically allowing people to understand what's available, have some visibility on what the market looks like to them in relation to different suppliers, products, and systems.

But for us to be able to actually engineer a mechanism for you to be able to put this into your design project, we've been building the KOPE web app. And as you can see on the screen here, we're just running through a little bit of an example of what that looks like at the moment.

And where we've been really focused is being able to make sure that all of these products are applicable to your project. And it goes back to what Ollie mentioned earlier on, where we're starting to build things in the sense of being a product and not necessarily just an individual snowflake project where everyone has to disband at the end of each piece of work.

So what we have here is, we have a lot of visibility based on the marketplace. But what we want to be able to do is to really dive into the information that sits within a lot of the products that you have available to you in your products. So first of all, we wanted to be able to have the ability to consume design.

So as we know, there's a lot of different tools there, Revit obviously being a primary one for us. And we have a lot of design files at different levels of detail that are available to designers at different points into the design process. We needed a place where you can bring that together and not necessarily worry too much about the high level of complexity, so to simplify things down, to focus around trading things in more of their basic geometric sense and the way that they interact with each other in a very simple sense. So what we're seeing on the screen is just an overview of us being able to apply a simple concrete slab to a building and then also give us some outputs on the right side of the screen.

So let's just run through the workflow and get our heads around what we're actually talking about here. So first of all, what we're trying to do is we're trying to connect directly to an automation system from the product market. So you have lots of different products, lots of different systems that are-- they might be structural, they might be services, they might be architectural. We have all of them set within that MMC Market. And as Ollie described earlier on, it's all nicely organized, and the information is nice and concise.

As we go then, we're able to then connect that directly into the manufacturer's input. So one of the things that Ollie's been working really hard on is the ability for you to be able to have really robust information around the product, not just the supplier.

So those two pieces of data are interlinked. You're able to update that nice and cleanly. And what we're avoiding here is the idea that you have a static Revit family that's set on a server somewhere, and it's completely disconnected from the people who designed it or manufacture it every day. We're able to tie those two things together.

So what you're seeing on the screen on the right side is just a little bit of information on how you would actually flex one of these panels. So on the right side, we're in a manufacturer's page on the market. We're able to then configure, and we move into another space and being able to just test and flex that content.

So let's have a look at what this actually would look like. And I think the big concept that we're trying to get across here is the application of our products isn't necessarily the ability to get a Revit family and see all of its different variations. It's actually getting it into the project.

So we're going to start off the process here with just a basic, simple structure that's come in from Revit file. We've converted that into IFC, and we have all of that information ready for us to be able to let us do some testing and exploring.

Now, anyone who's familiar with computational design or anything around the world of Dynamo knows that we're probably able to write a complex script and have an element and test out possible layouts for it on the floor. But we're not really focused on that space. What we're trying to do here is to allow people to have high speed iteration and high speed testing of any product that they can purchase and related to an actual project directly.

So what we're going to do here is we're just going to isolate that slab. And we're going to pull that out and try to then see how that simple slab piece that we've brought from the marketplace directly into the workspace and apply it to that slab.

Now, when you get into this here, this is a very, very complex piece we've been working on for quite a while. So as Ollie's been building up the data set and the infrastructure and how a product relates to a supplier and relates to its system, what we've been doing is leveraging that structure and saying, well, actually, this is how it interacts with itself within that system.

So as you can see on the screen, there's lots of placement elements of those slabs on the screen. And what we're able to then do is just test different scenarios. And if we roll back to-- one of the original problems that we have as an industry is that when you're deciding to maybe do some of your construction offsite and necessarily move into that productized world, you have to make those decisions pretty early on. And it's a constant problem.

If you want to go down the road of converting, let's say, something that would have been an in-situ sub into something that is prefabricated, there's a lot of decisions that are knocked on from that. And it typically needs to be done relatively early in the process, or there's quite a lot of redesign done, let's say, around the tender stage. What we're trying to do with KOPE is to be able to make that decision or have that analysis at any point in the process-- bringing in a file, understand what's there, and actually be able to apply it.

So I think one of the major pieces that we're trying to do is string a very simple process together for all of our partners that I've been working with for the last couple of years. So what Ollie went through in detail with us earlier on was, let's talk about visibility. Let's have the access of who is actually able to supply to us as constructors.

And what are those manufacturers and suppliers able to provide to us? Where, when, how, what does it cost? What does it look like? And that information has been really well-established on the marketplace. But for us, what we've been trying to do is like, where do we take that to the next stage? Where is the next step of that going to be?

And what we see is three main next steps beyond that. So the first two, as we've discussed, is already been built, and Ollie's gone through that today. But these three pieces now are the next step for us. And the first two are already in play, and we'll discuss these a little bit of detail now.

So first of all is a Flex product. So we want to really start to move the industry a little bit away from having these big, static libraries. The amount of resources that have been spent on interoperability and data management and just storing families, upgrading Revit files, moving information across different systems, has been significant. And I think a lot of people who are in the class here today will be very familiar with the fact that is a bit of a challenge.

So we're trying to be able to do is to make sure that the flexing of those products is simple, it is within the limitations of the manufacturer, and that that manufacturer then has assurance that when those elements are placed within the design fold, that they adhere to the rules and the logic of that piece. But if you can get the logic built in a concise enough way, what you can actually do-- [INAUDIBLE] showed you where you are in relation to that concrete slab-- is to be able to apply that product.

So being able to apply it across a project, let's say, it's all structural elements. It's including MEP. We're going to be swapping out generic, simple walls that might be in a Revit file for wall panels that are insulated. They're fully closed panels, so that said, you've got their MEP systems built in. What's exciting about that is that it's directly tied to the information that's set within the MMC Market.

So all of the metadata is pulled across. It's connected between the two instances. And we're not just getting a Revit family and placing it in an array in a project. What we're doing is understanding, at a very high level, how exactly that product will fit into that building, how it relates to the facade system, how it relates to the MEP systems, what the logistical challenges are bringing it on site.

And lots of the complexity around that space-- highly computational, very difficult to build. But what we want to be able to do here, and what we've been building over the last six months, primarily, has been making that as simple as possible for the user to be able to engage with, so dragging in a product and running it on a project.

And I think the logical end game here-- and I think a lot of us who understand the way that the products need to be brought to the project space, primarily-- is the fact that you can then connect two pieces, so having the supplier's and supply chain in general being connected directly to the consumer, whether that be a designer or a contractor, having that all in one singular space.

So where we are is-- an overall vision of where we're landed at the moment is that the first two pieces of this are very much set within the MMC Market. So we have to find a supplier, find a product built on there. Ollie will discuss how you can engage with that later on.

The next part of that which we are in the weeds of right now-- it's a very exciting time-- is that we're working through the flex and the applies. So first of all, the flex is built directly into the Marketplace. We're able to see all of this content flex relations to the supplier. But then finally, we have that apply.

And the next phase then for us is going to be moving into the actual procurement process and making sure that all of these things are linked. One of the comments that Ollie made earlier on in relation to volatility in our market is, we don't necessarily see, in the short term, any stabilization of that happening. And so it's really important for us to be able to make sure that cost and time implications are much easier to integrate into your project planning. And that's the next step that we're building with KOPE.

So where does that fit in for the different kind of personas within the industry? So we've broken things down into four main pieces. So we've definitely centered around where our journey began originally, which was very much around the volumetric space.

So we've been focused around high precision engineered products, which are typically volumetric modular units that are in residential. Interestingly enough, within that module you've very much got all their systems. You've got the bathroom pods, you've got wall systems, floor cassettes, ceiling cassettes.

So they're essentially a mini building in a lot of ways. But their procurement route and their supply route was slightly different. And so first, we want to be able to just make sure that you're able to go from design fabrication in a really seamless way. And a lot of our history as a company is very much based around that concept.

One of the biggest benefits of what Ollie's been building in the MMC Market is the ability for a manufacturer just to be able to speak about what they do and to focus on talking about their great work and not necessarily worry too much about their visibility. As designers, when we've been specifying different buildings and working through designs, you don't necessarily always know what's available to you. And you don't necessarily know what they can and can't do and where they can and can't do it. So what we're trying to provide for manufacturers is a route in to a place where a lot of designers are able to come and understand their wares and understand the metadata set behind that product.

Now, when it moves into the design, it very much is our background originally. And we definitely see an opportunity here for us to directly address what Ollie talked about at the start of the session today, which was around the reduction in skills and the volatility in cost and time. For designers, they just need to be able to be faster in making decisions. They need to be able to make them in a much broader time frame whenever they need to, for different reasons.