Modular specialist Reds10 believes it can treble production at its facility in Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire through a combination of automation and industrialisation – and by using Autodesk software.

In a short film with Autodesk, Reds10 chairman Paul Ruddick states: “We’re currently producing 4,000 units a year. However, with our partnership with Autodesk, the work we’re doing on automation, the work we’re doing on industrialisation and the work we’re doing in manufacturing, we believe we can accrete this to 12,000 [units] – on the same site, with the same people. That’s what industrialisation is.”

Reds10 is known for delivering modular schools, healthcare and military accommodation. In the film, Ruddick notes: “The construction industry has a massive issue, in that productivity hasn’t improved in the last 30 or 40 years. And the reason for that is fragmentation: we have 20 or 30 organisations designing the building and another 20 or 30 to build it. 

“Reds10’s vision is to address this issue of fragmentation… by industrialising through manufacturing and onsite activity and design. What we do is we bring everything in-house. We get a blank piece of paper and a site, and then we deliver a school, a hospital, a prison, army accommodation or a health care project.”

Enhanced performance requirements

As an example, Ruddick cites the £22m Wembley Manor SEND school, delivering 150 new specialist places on London Road for the London Borough of Brent.

Scott Laird, AI and technical director at Reds10, explains: “[The client had] enhanced performance requirements for the building. Because we’re a design-led company, we’ve done a lot of testing over the years. What that meant was we could build very quickly, knowing we were going to hit the performance requirements. 

“We used pretty much everything in Forma Industry Cloud to create the golden thread for London Road. And we use it so we can link anything across the piece in the technical submittals, issues, reviews, assets – we can link that to one single place.”

Laird continues: “London Road had over 1,300 bolts in it, so 1,300 pictures assigned to an asset. We can now run numerous AI models, Autodesk included, to basically analyse [that] information. 

“We automate compliance checks – when we find an issue with a photo, it’ll create an issue, assign it to the person that’s taken the photo, and we’ll have a full audit train. 

“Some of the efficiencies we’ll get by having an API that is connected to all the systems is massive as well. That was when we went from a couple of weeks to 30 seconds.”

Fastest build 

“The London Borough of Brent is one of the fastest schools that we have built,” adds Laird. “We’re looking at 25-26 weeks that we delivered in central London. The level of finish was one of the highest that we’ve [achieved] in schools. We were able to deliver that project two weeks early.”

Ruddick adds: “We’re now building schools 40% quicker than traditional construction, [and] reducing our labour input in the factories by 30%. But more importantly, using Autodesk products, we’re reducing our design of the buildings by 12 weeks, down to six weeks.”

According to Laird, the Autodesk software can scale with Reds10’s growth: “Forma Industry Cloud can grow with us. It doesn’t matter if we’re doing 10 projects or a thousand. The same system can be done over and over again. So in the future, we will be able to get AI to automate and that stuff we’ll be able to scale up.”