Prefabricated Modular Construction - Aurora Medical Center - Grafton, WI

Prefabrication right now is really revolutionizing the way we do construction. Every project that comes through the system gets looked at first with the eyes of prefabrication. Today our customers don't want anything different than they wanted 50 years ago. They want their projects faster, they want them delivered at a lower cost, and they want them delivered at a higher degree of quality. I think that the prefabrication or the industrialization of construction allows us to deliver that. We are a very busy, thriving hospital. What goes along with that is managing capacity. And so you think about the construction, what I think about is at the end of all of this, we have more access for our patients and our community. This project, this modular building, allows us to add 16 additional beds to the organization, and that was kind of the brainchild of thinking about how will we satisfy this growing demand for our community. We choose to build mockups on the modular projects because of the complexity and the preciseness of the planning. We have these pieces that we put together in a prototype or a mockup space being fabricated just the way that they would in real life. As we created the mockup, more and more and more lessons learned were tested out and applied. So it enabled us to have a really strong and compact fabrication cycle. I think it's been an evolutionary process that's gotten us to where we are today to be able to take a look at what we're doing right now with the modularization here in Manitowoc. Modular construction to me is taking what would be done all on a construction site and trying to shrink down that schedule. We're trying to eliminate as much finished product work happening at the end and get to a point where the finished product, the experience that the user feels, is done in a factory setting where the environment is controlled. We can literally start the interiors of that project while we're putting the foundations in which allows us to use fewer people for longer durations of time in order to get the work done. The thing that was appealing about this particular type of construction is obviously the speed of it. The entire time frame from start to finish is cut in half, if not more. Something comes from an inception or a design, an idea, and actually gets put in play months and months faster. These are custom built facilities. When we get them done, they look just like a conventionally built structure. The rooms, they look cleaner, they look crisper. When you walk into them, they're bright, they pop, there aren't imperfections, there's zero defects. The sustainability of the building, because it's constructed with all of the sustainability that our existing building has, so it matches the footprint of our existing building, whether it's external or internal. I think that's the thing that our customers are seeing. They can't believe that they can get this quality through this process in this shortest period of time. With such a deep history in prefab that Bolt has, there's really no limit to what Bolt can do. This is as advanced as anyone is in the industry right now. The possibilities are endless. People that come up with innovative and unique solutions to complex problems is really what Bolt is built on. Through that process, we continue to develop long lasting relationships with our customers because we're solving their problem. We're able to deliver their projects faster, cheaper, and a higher degree of quality than we could using conventional methods. We are doing in a couple of months what would have taken a couple of years to do. You can't beat this. It's through partnerships with organizations like Bolt that help us bring our vision into reality. We couldn't ask for a better partner. Bolt's been amazing.