Explore the Agenda
8:00 am Check-In & Morning Coffee
8:50 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Building a High-Performing Prefab Workforce: Strengthening Buy-In, Skill Growth, & Sustainable Talent
9:00 am Driving Stronger Buy-In & Workforce Stability Through Effective Culture & Leadership
- Strengthening leadership practices that build a culture of retention- improving engagement, ensure staff feel valued, loyalty, and on-site performance
- How to fast-track workforce training and develop frontline leaders at scale to deal with rapid expansion, and ensure staff are ready to deliver from day one
- Implement practical retention strategies that reduce turnover and stabilize your workforce amidst rising labour pressures
9:40 am Panel Discussion: Strengthening Cross-Functional Collaboration to Improve Constructability, Reduce Delays, & Enhance Project Certainty
- Increasing buy-in from detailers, project teams, and field crews to ensure smoother prefab implementation and eliminate the notion that one team can do it all
- Bringing designers, BIM leaders, engineers, and trade partners together earlier to prevent coordination breakdowns, ensure accountability, reduce potential rework, and ensure realistic delivery timelines
- Prioritizing early procurement and modularization strategies to predict workforce demand, prevent spikes in manpower, and deliver more predictable project outcomes
10:25 am Building Prefab as a Career Path: Developing, Retaining, & Advancing the Next Generation
- Cultivating clear growth paths – from apprentice to foreman to fab-shop leader- to improve retention and build a stable pipeline of future supervisors and specialists
- Investing in workforce wellbeing, structured training, and rapid-skill development programs to equip new talent quickly and keep skilled workers engaged in a strained labour market
- Strengthening local recruitment strategies and long-term talent development, focusing on remote regions to reduce the dependence on transient labour and ensure reliable project staffing
11:00 am Morning Networking Break
Driving Increased Fabrication Output with Early Alignment, Shared Milestones, & Smarter Coordination
12:00 pm Eliminating the Cost & Delay of Late Coordination with Early, Integrated Workflow Planning
- Uniting field teams, detailers, and VDC at project origin to ensure standards are aligned early, facilitating more accurate, buildable designs from day one
- Establishing shared schedules, milestone commitments, and accountability structures to prevent coordination delays, prefab misses, and timeline mismanagement across all parties
- Utilizing digital platforms to visualize workflows, for clash visibility, and choke-point prediction to streamline coordination, reduce rework, and ensure projects advance as planned
12:30 pm Audience Discussion: Maximizing Coordination Potential to Accelerate Fabrication & Increase Project Output
- Discussing potential strategies to shrink the timeline between BIM, coordination, sign-off, and fabrication to prevent schedule compression and maintain the flow of production
- Aligning teams on design issues vs. constructability issues to reduce unnecessary BIM rework and fast-track projects into fabrication earlier
- Leveraging coordination platforms to their maximum ability to improve connectivity across architects, design teams, general contractors, and engineers to minimize meeting time, limit communication gaps, and increase overall output
1:00 pm Networking Lunch
Maximizing Fabrication Output with Automation: Overcoming Labour Shortages & Delivering Measurable ROI
2:00 pm Debate: Does Leveraging Welding Automation Increase Output and Offset Labour Shortages?
- Understanding the importance of automation in supporting your workforce to produce more with the same labour force and overcome labour-shortage constraints
- Evaluating the performance and ROI of advanced welding machines, from pipe welding machines to autonomous welders, to make confident investments that deliver evident productivity gains
- Identifying the most user-friendly, high-output automation tools and how to operate them effectively to maximise machine performance, reduce delays caused by learning hurdles, and accelerate overall output
2:45 pm Predicting Equipment & Material Needs Early to Maximize Project Schedules
- Understanding the unique pressures of mission-critical projects and the national competition for limited machinery to better anticipate risks and secure requirements earlier
- Exploring forecasting and prediction models for material and equipment management, prediction, and tracking to avoid project shortfalls
- Exploring early procurement packages and long-lead design strategies to safeguard schedules, reduce delays, and increase confidence when a project lands unexpectedly