WASHINGTON, DC-A growing portion of Skanska's development pipeline is devoted to prefabrication, Skanska's Tony Colonna, the vice president of prefabrication operations at Skanska, tells GlobeSt.com.

"We have a residential project in New York that is fully modular and we are looking at projects for dorms, prisons and even the high tech sector," he says. In the case of the latter, a high tech firm is considering building a wafer fabrication facility using prefabrication.

The reason for the growing interest, Colonna says, is, of course financial, although not in the way that most people would expect. Prefabricated building does deliver some savings in construction costs but those savings are rather limited. Rather, where the value is – and the savings – is the accelerated time to market. "We are able to take a 10% to 20% off of a construction schedule with prefabrication." The construction savings are usually mitigated by the increased logistics and transportation costs of shipping the modules to the building site. "The financial value proposition is created from the shorter schedule and the earlier opening date," Colonna says.

Health care is another sector in which Skanska has been focusing its pre fabrication activities, he adds. "That is one of our key market sectors and there is such opportunity there.

Skanska executives, in fact, recently attended HILTI's Baltimore/Washington D.C. Healthcare Symposium to speak to an audience of healthcare and construction industry professionals about prefabrication.