You solve the connection problem on each project. So does every competitor, in private, at maximum cost.

Every offsite manufacturer has built its own way to connect it’s module to a building, to a neighbor module, to power and water and air. Each solution works. Each one is private. None of them speak to each other.

The cost of that isolation is your ceiling. A developer who buys from you is locked to you. A project that needs two factories manages the overhead of two incompatible systems. Your market stops at the edge of your own design services.

The way out is a different business

The way out is not a better one-off. It is a different business model. The field is moving from services to products. A manufacturer today finds a client, designs a one-off for that project, builds it, then starts over the following week. A manufacturer tomorrow sells pre-designed, pre-engineered, pre-certified products from a catalog, again and again.

That change is hard, and CfOC will not pretend otherwise. It costs real money to pre-engineer a catalog before the orders arrive. It takes nerve to turn away a custom job on the faith of building a product line. It asks your people to work in a way they have not worked before. The reward is a business that scales, instead of a business that restarts every Monday.

What the open standard does for you

An open standard is what makes the catalog worth building. Conform to the open baseline, and your product fits any project that specifies it. Your addressable market widens past your own client list. Your cost to interoperate drops, because the interface is shared rather than negotiated deal by deal. A developer can require the standard without enriching any single firm, which is exactly why developers will require it. They can become your customers without ever learning your name.

What the Center for Offsite Construction does

CfOC builds and stewards that open baseline. The work proceeds in four steps:

1. Name the shift, so the change to a product business is legible.
2. Map what it requires, so you know precisely what conforming means.
3. Ship the open standards, agreements, and formats through an ANSI-accredited consensus process, free to adopt.
4. Help early adopters apply them on real projects.

The consensus process is open to you. A manufacturer joins as a producer voice and helps write the standard it will adopt. You shape the interface rather than inherit it.

Already producing

• CfOC holds ANSI-accredited standards-development status. The first open connectivity standard is now in active development.
• The consensus committee is open to manufacturer participation under a balanced, public process.
• The Models of Delivery map lays out the full path from custom service to catalog product.

Two ways to begin

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Want to keep learning? The Philosophy essays on this site make the deeper case for why building is changing and what it means. →