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Transcript

Prefab Review - Hi, my name is Michael Frank and this is The Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Jordan Easterling. Jordan is the founder of Building Swell and I'm sure he can explain what they do better than me but basically, they make software that helps prefab companies better run their operations. Previously, he was a VP at Factory OS which is a modular company and he worked at ManufactOn which is another software solution for the offsite manufacturing industry. We're going to try to have a wide-ranging conversation about his journey and his areas of expertise because I think it'll be really helpful. We get a lot of questions about what really happens in the factory and in the construction process. And since he's been an executive and founder in this space, he can definitely be helpful. So Jordan, Welcome.

Building Swell - Hey, thanks for having me Michael. I’m really excited to chat.

Prefab Review - Awesome! Well, thanks again. So I guess to start, you obviously worked at a bunch of different spots within the industry. Can you tell me a bit about your personal journey and how you got involved in what you did at each of your professional spots?

Building Swell - Yeah, absolutely. At the very start, you know, I was a structural engineer by education and basically stumbled into forensic engineering. And what that means is if something failed on a job site or something failed as part of a construction project, I had to figure it out. So, what was the mode of failure? And you know, how can we support folks that are digging into that? And I was doing that for quite some time. And then the lines get a little bit blurry when you start looking at not just buildings that have already been completed, but how can we start to prevent some of those problems from coming up during the design or during the pre-construction phase? During that journey I was exposed to a really interesting project that was by default a prefabricated project. And it was my first foray into that space. And oh man, it was so fascinating. That was a light bulb moment for me I thought, “well, wait a second. if we're doing it for this project that actually needs prefab because it's in this remote location but it's working really well, why aren't we doing this more broadly in the construction space?” I mean, this is applicable for any project. And so that peaked my curiosity.I did some more consultative projects around that. I was at a company called ManufactOn that was focused on providing high level status tracking for different prefabricated builds. But you know what, you mentioned most recently I was at a company called Factory Os. And FactoryOs focuses on these multifamily mid-rise, wood frameed apartment complexes. Basically apartment units but manufactured in more of a manufacturing workflow. And there I was responsible for anything the tech touched.

And I'd like to break it into 4 big areas. We looked at commercially viable R&D so, you know lidar or a lot of times like hardware applications. And then we built a bit of custom software just from the ground up. And then we also looked what can we pull off the shelf from the software side and develop training or implementation programs around that. And that was a super fascinating time at fFactoryOS but really good exposure to see what is the tool set available for a modular builder or prefabricated contractor.

I guess at Building Swell, I stepped away from Factory OS in 2021 to focus on what we do at Building Swell. Now full-time and at a high level, we focus on, I think you hit the nail right on the head, running a shop is really hard. It's so multivariable and so where Building Swell comes in is we help manage teams and some of the production schedules. Even when you have a myriad of different project schedules and help manage inventory. Basically a lot of the the difficult planning and operation style functions. We help shops tackle that.

Prefab Review - Got it. That's helpful to understand. So I guess let's jump in. So FactoryOS has gotten a lot of press in the Bay area, where where we both live. They partnered with a bunch of the big tech companies to do different multifamily and sort of high profile projects. So they partnered with both Google and Facebook or at least one of those 2 companies I know.

Building Swell - Yeah I forget what's been published. But yeah, definitely some big some big names in the tech space. And you know a lot of either corporate housing or a good a blend, FactoryOS says a really good blend of affordable supportive and market rate housing.

Prefab Review - So that's like a fairly scaled company relative to at least a lot of the prefab companies we work with. So is a lot of what you're doing bringing like the best practices that a company like that would have to maybe a smaller company or is it actually providing a different capability?

Building Swell - Yeah, you know it's a little bit of that. I would say there are a couple challenges regardless of what type of prefabrication you run. You know, some of our customers are in the electrical space. So they're not necessarily doing these volumetric modular residential units. So it can be broadly applied but really where we focus is any time that you're building something prefabricated. There's a high degree of variance or a degree of of change that happens in the product line that you're building. And so really where we focus is bringing best practices into these spaces but also making it very clear when something varies, how does that impact your production process? One of the things that we hear over and over from different companies is, “we don't really build the same thing twice.” You may have a product catalog where you're building the same studio unit but every local jurisdiction is going to have different requirements based on what you can and can't do and what some of the the subassemblies have to look like. And so we make it really easy to capture that variability and and give you the next steps or what's next.

Prefab Review - What were companies doing before before you existed? Were they using another software? Was it going to some gantt chart and was kind of done less rigorously how? How are people dealing with these sort of different variations of housing before 2021?

Building Swell - We see a variety of things. There are some companies that will try to leverage a true manufacturing software. And there are some very powerful, very wonderful softwares, but it could be very expensive. The bigger challenge is that some of this software just doesn't capture the variability that you see in construction. It's assuming when you build something, you're building the same thing over and over and over again. Let's say an automotive manufactur