The word ’home’ itself conjures the feeling of coziness and comfort. Now the concept of home is changing, and so are the construction trends. Today’s homeowners have different priorities than homeowners of the past. Meeting those demands in an affordable way is increasingly challenging. Advancement in technology brings flexibility in residential construction market where costly time-consuming projects are now completed more quickly and cost effectively. Prescient Co Inc., a digital design-build construction company is transforming the shape of residential construction through emerging technologies with its vision of attainable housing for all. In the construction business, multifamily construction is plagued by rising costs, decreasing productivity, acrimonious relationships between participants with slim margins, all while the need for attainable housing is increasing globally. Prescient’s mission is to revolutionize this environment. Prescient is the only digital designbuild company which harnesses proprietary technology to link the discrete disciplines of architectural design, engineering, manufacturing and construction. It creates an efficient, transparent, coordinated and collaborative process in the building of up to 180-foot light gauge steel structures in multi-unit housing and hospitality. The company accomplishes this through standardized design, data sharing, precise off-site manufacturing, just in time and accurate placement of inventory on site, with a QR-coded framing component system for rapid assembly.
An Ideal Service
Prescient has a proprietary digital thread technology that links the entire design, planning, engineering, manufacturing and assembly process of multifamily construction. This approach significantly reduces the time; cost and risks associated with typical development projects. The light gauge steel building components are manufactured at state of art facilities to tolerances less than 1 mm. It’s a combination of software and hardware solutions that continue to evolve to meet a greater set of customer and industry needs. Prescient’s design and engineering team will integrate with the rest of the project design team including providing the necessary information for the design and engineering of the foundation and/or podium of the project. They will produce the required stamped drawings and calculations at all major design milestones. Prescient’s automated production of the building super structure provides the ideal platform to model other major building systems economically and effectively. The structural model can be produced very early during the design phase, enabling more accurate information to be available when it is most needed. The company also offers additional modeling services that can lead to significant cost savings by streamlining project coordination, eliminating conflicts on site, and providing more accurate information for detailed pricing exercises.
A High Flying Executive
Magued Eldaief spent 27 years as a senior executive in GE before arriving as Prescient’s CEO in 2017. He has built a world class leadership team from within the industry coupled with executives from other industries with deep functional experience. He has been instrumental in improving project and manufacturing execution and defining a clear technology and investment roadmap.
Striking Appearance
Since its inception, Prescient has grown from a few employees with a 6,000 SF pilot plant in 2013 to 400 employees and two 120,000 SF plants with 12M SF of annual production capacity. It has completed 37 buildings and over 5.9M SF of residential space and discovered additional customer needs with every project. This has led the company to launch many new products such as integrated stairways, elevators, metal decking, balconies and now external sheathing. Each of these new products has helped to reduce the time and cost of completing projects.
Enticing Strategy
Prescient’s system touches and affects not only the developer, architect and GC but also all the MEP trades working on the building. In many of its early projects, it was able to assemble the building at its accelerated pace (up to 20k SF/week) but the other trades weren’t prepared to keep up. Thus, the developer and GC really didn’t save anything from the speed at which the company framed the building. Now, the company holds pre-project summits where the GC brings all the trades to one of its current sites and describes how the project will work. The company makes sure everyone knows what to expect and how to organize their teams to operate at a pace consistent with it.
Comprehensive Future Offerings
In the opinion of Prescient, upcoming tech solutions will be addressing more and more of the industry’s needs and customer pain points. That’s why Prescient continues to innovate to solve a greater proportion of customer and industry challenges and will soon launch new digital portals which will bring even greater power and ROI to developers. The system has just recently been accredited to build structures up to 65 feet/5 stories in seismic regions. The first seismic project to feature the company’s approach is the 1.4M SF UC Davis student housing project. It’s the largest student housing project anywhere in the US. And now the company is working to get accredited to build up to 12 stories in seismic regions. In that pursuit it has collected over 500M data points for 842 different tests, spent over $4M and used over 15,000 engineering consulting hours to prove the integrity of company’s system.
Testimonials
“Generation Atlanta will be the first building in the city to utilize the Prescient structural system. The technology will reduce construction costs by 20 to 25 percent compared to using concrete, enabling the development to comply with the City of Atlanta’s initiative to provide more affordable housing.”— Kaplan Residential
“We have converted multiple projects from other structural systems to Prescient for the simple reason that we would not have been able to finish the projects on time and on budget without Prescient on the team. Our clients have been so impressed with Prescient they frequently bring their peers and consultants to the construction site.” — Chris Hirst Senior Vice President for CBG Building Company.
Magued Eldaief | CEO | Prescient Co. Inc.
