Video: Ask an Expert How can self-performing GCs enhance constructability?

Welcome to “Ask an Expert,” a series exploring some of today’s pressing topics in the construction industry, and how a self-performing general contractor can bring added value to your projects. From labor availability to cost control, and schedule reliability to quality assurance, we highlight some of the complexities and opportunities you might be facing on current and future projects. Our experts share their perspective on how self-performing construction teams can make a difference, so that you have a bit more insight to move forward with confidence.

This discussion has been edited for clarity.

How can self-performing GCs enhance constructability?

Marc: You asked me to separate each of them. So if it's quality, safety, whatever the case might be, that's really hard to do because when you're involved early and you have those subject matter experts who are heavily involved, understand that part of the business extremely well, they're not separating those things. They're not separating quality from safety. They're looking at constructability, actually what's the easiest way to build it, which also probably makes it the safest way to build it, and also probably ensures a higher level of quality because everybody's familiar with what they're going to be building.

And by the way, when I talk about constructability, it's really two components. It's one, can we actually build this or not? Like that's constructability in its most primitive form. But then it's how do I make it more constructible in terms of productivity? How do I increase productivity? How do I tweak certain things in the building that the designers may have no opinion on because they don't know. But we know as those subject matter experts, they know what can be done to make that project just easier to build.

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