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AEC Technology Glossary

Construction & Field

What is Prefabrication & DfMA?

Prefabrication moves construction work from the site to a factory — wall panels, bathroom pods, MEP racks — while DfMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly) is the design discipline that makes prefab possible: designing components to be manufactured efficiently and assembled quickly on site.

In practice

The hard part is upstream: designs must commit to manufacturable systems early. Productization platforms encode manufacturers' rules so their systems configure themselves into BIM models, bridging design intent and factory constraints.

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