2 minute readTwo schools of thought crystallize around residential construction’s challenge of extracting itself from the rut of too many 100-year-old practices.
One starts with a blank sheet of paper. It proposes to discard all given knowledge and wisdom as too rife with problems, cross-purposes and conflicts to be worth carrying any part of it into a new value chain.
This school of thought claims that homebuilding’s end-to-end lifecycle needs a total makeover. That makeover might best resemble a productization development diagram – simplified, streamlined, designed, and baked for accountability and efficient management – like, say, computers or even more complex physical platforms or systems.
An alternative school of thought considers the blank-sheet-of-paper approach the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Homebuilding can significantly evolve and better itself, and improve and expand its capacity to provide shelter and community to people, proponents of this view assert, without starting from scratch.
Builders FirstSource ceo Dave Flitman ascribes to this school, a school committed to build on the construction community’s bedrock of trusted intricate relationships, collaborations, dynamics, and a track-record of “what works,” as foundation for change and improvement at scale.
Flitman says as much as he offers insight in a brief conversation with The Builder’s Daily into rationale for the announcement this morning that
Flitman promises as much in this morning’s statement.
Establishing digital solutions leadership for the homebuilding industry is expected to drive growth and efficiency for Builders FirstSource’s distribution network by enabling it to efficiently and seamlessly align with customers and better support the entire homebuilding construction process.
It’s no Katerra, but what the Builders FirstSource-Paradigm combination represents is a re-tooling of building’s value chain, with technology, automation, data, and design thinking serving to augment people who happen to know a lot about and love what they do.
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