Canada’s housing crisis has hit record levels with the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corp estimating a shortfall of 3.5 Million homes by 2030.This supply gap is increasing rapidly due to rising immigration levels. In fact, according to a Desjardins Report, Canada will have to increase their housing starts by 50% immediately to fill this rising demand. 

To address this crisis, the Canadian government has pledged $4B in financing via the Rapid Housing Initiative. This initiative will add another 10,000 units including 3,200 modular units in an accelerated time frame. In fact modular construction offers a unique opportunity to close this rapidly increasing supply gap. Modular units can be assembled in a controlled factory setting and benefit from the speed, cost advantages and enhanced quality control that comes with manufacturing processes over traditional job site construction.

In fact, according to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association many Canadian builders have already identified this opportunity and over the next 3 years, 90% of builders surveyed are considering a modular approach. 

ANC Group, as a vertically integrated modular builder and Offsight customer, oversees the entire lifecycle of their multifamily modular and residential projects, including development, manufacturing, and on-site construction. They have also been recipients of the Rapid Funding Initiatives, actively contributing to the provision of affordable housing to those in need

In this Live From the Floor case study we review how ANC Group is tackling Canada’s affordable housing crisis and how Offsight helps the team merge technology with building expertise to deliver on their vision, manage projects and drive value in the day to day factory operations. 

When it comes to meeting Canada’s need for affordable housing the team at ANC highlights 3 key factors that must be met. These are speed in reducing project timelines, cost efficiency in building economically and quality excellence in ultimately delivering a product that can overcome the consistent waste, rework and repairs that plague traditional stick built housing. 

To achieve this goal ANC pairs their multifaceted capabilities in developing and building multifamily housing with Offsight’s technology to manage their factory operations, provide visibility to project stakeholders and enable collaboration across facets of their business. In effect Offsight enables ANC to harness the full innate value that offsite and modular construction can bring to solving Canada’s affordable housing crisis.  

Offsight was set up to provide a digital workflow that matched ANC’s physical production process. Once the workflow was launched, operators, managers, executives and other project stakeholders could manage the end to end production and offsite project delivery process through Offsight.

Offsight’s Production Management and Reporting functionality allows ANC to track progress of many multifamily modules while maintaining high-quality standards. Managers can immediately access the status of each module in Offsight’s Live Dashboard and track modules by their specific multifamily or affordable housing project. They can get in the moment updates on delivery, schedule impacts and make sure that all sign offs happen prior to shipment.

Status reports can be sent daily to all project stakeholders throughout the vertically integrated value chain at ANC to enable seamless collaboration between the factory and jobsite teams to keep projects on track. Furthermore Offsight provides end to end production traceability allowing onsite installers or project teams to immediately retrieve any module’s full production record for review.

By managing production in real time through Offsight, ANC can ensure that they meet and exceed project delivery dates and maintain an expedited schedule that’s needed for Canada’s affordable housing projects. 

Offsight’s Materials & Inventory Management  capabilities allow multifamily and affordable housing developers to accurately manage their variable project costs in real time. A key element to delivering cost effective housing is being able to control material consumption, track material waste and maintain inventory to avoid production stoppage or downtime. 

Through Offsight’s feature set ANC can track material consumption directly from the floor. Operators can access a customized bill of material for each module and record as parts are consumed in specific production workstations throughout assembly. Any defective materials that arrive or materials that are lost due to assembly errors can be identified as waste. By being able to track live consumption by module and across all modules in a multifamily or affordable housing project, ANC can accurately manage a key element of variable project costs well before their modules arrive on the jobsite for installation and far before the project completes. 

Offsight’s Quality Tracking and Task Management functionality provides a crucial value add for modular affordable housing and multifamily builders. Through Offsight, ANC is able to immediately identify and track assembly and non-conformance issues directly from the floor. Issues can be tagged to specific modules and to specific stages of factory assembly.

Through Offsight’s Alerts Dashboard managers and supervisors can track issues and assign them for repair. Floor operators and quality personnel can receive in-app alerts to review issues and when they are resolved the issues can be marked “completed” to remove them from the queue. 

In this manner Offsight helps affordable housing builders reduce costly jobsite rework and maintain a high level of quality excellence without compromising the project speed and overall project budget. Furthermore a full end to end record with quality certification through production can be provided in Ofsight to other stakeholders in the project. This ensures that all assembly is up to code. Service teams can also access these records before and after installation to streamline their work process.