A facade contractor designs, fabricates and installs the external envelope of a building, covering unitised and stick curtain walling, structural glazing, cladding, windows and skylights. The business runs an engineering function, a factory and a site erection operation at the same time, on material that is frequently imported with long lead times. With Pentoggle, a facade business can describe its panel types, fabrication stages and installation sequence and generate the starting application around them.
Two things make this unlike other construction trades. The work is manufactured off site as thousands of individually identified components, each belonging to a specific location on a specific elevation. And it has to fit a structure whose actual dimensions are not the drawing's dimensions.
Testing standards, tolerance requirements, warranty terms and approval processes are set by the applicable specification and client requirements, so build around what your own contracts require.
Key takeaways
- The panel is the unit of work, and every one of them has a location, a type and a status that changes several times.
- The structure as built rarely matches the drawing exactly, and fabricating before surveying is one of the more expensive mistakes available in this trade.
- Mockup and sample approvals gate mass fabrication and are largely outside your control.
- Fabricated panels waiting to be installed are cash, fragility and occupied space at once.
- A useful number is panels fabricated and not yet installed, aged from the date of fabrication.
Three businesses running at different speeds
A facade contractor is running an engineering office, a manufacturing operation and a site installation crew, and each works on a different cadence.
Engineering produces system design, structural calculations, shop drawings and fabrication drawings, and it works months ahead. Fabrication works in batches, driven by material availability and factory capacity, and needs long visibility to be efficient. Installation works to the main contractor's programme, floor by floor, and is interrupted by things nobody controls.
Many of the failures in this business are coordination failures between these three rather than problems inside any one of them. Fabrication runs ahead of installation and the factory output has nowhere to go. Installation reaches a floor for which the panels were never released because a drawing was pending. Engineering revises a detail after fabrication has started on it.
What connects them is a single record of every panel and its state, which is why panel-level tracking is not a refinement in this business but the spine of it. A panel is designed, released for fabrication, fabricated, quality checked, dispatched, received at site, hoisted and installed. Eight states, thousands of objects, three departments, and in most facade businesses the answer to where any of it stands lives in a spreadsheet maintained by one person in the factory and another on site.
The building is not the size the drawing says
This is one of the features that sets facade apart from most other trades, and it is where some of the largest losses happen.
Panels are manufactured to dimensions. The concrete structure they attach to is built to a tolerance, which means slab edges are not exactly where the drawing puts them, floors vary in level, and columns are out of plumb within permitted limits. Those deviations are entirely normal and within the civil contractor's rights. The facade still has to fit.
Bracket systems exist to absorb this, and they absorb a defined range. When the actual deviation exceeds what the bracket was designed for, the options are all expensive: remake panels, modify the structure, engineer a special bracket, or accept a visual defect that will be argued over at handover.
The protection is survey before fabrication. Measuring the structure as built, elevation by elevation and floor by floor, and checking those readings against design dimensions before releasing panels for manufacture. Where deviations are within range, fabrication proceeds. Where they are not, it is a conversation with the main contractor while it is still cheap to have.
The reason this goes wrong is timing pressure. Fabrication has a long lead time, the programme is tight, and releasing panels before the floors exist feels like the only way to hold the schedule. Sometimes it is. What matters is that the decision is made knowingly, with the survey position recorded, rather than by default because nobody was holding the two sets of numbers side by side.
A survey record held against design dimensions, by elevation and floor, with the deviation computed and flagged where it exceeds tolerance, is a small thing to build and it protects the single largest exposure in the business.
Mockups gate everything and you do not control them
Before mass fabrication, many facade contracts require approvals such as material samples, visual mockups on site and, where the specification calls for it, a performance mockup tested at a laboratory for air, water and structural behaviour.
These are genuine engineering gates and they exist for good reasons. Commercially they create a specific problem, which is that a long-lead procurement and a long fabrication programme sit behind an approval that depends on a consultant, a client and sometimes a testing laboratory working to their own schedule.
The consequence is familiar. The approval takes six weeks instead of two, the fabrication programme has no float, and the contractor either loses time at the end of the project or starts fabrication at risk before approval. Both are expensive and the second is worse.
What helps is treating approvals as tracked waiting items with an age and an owner rather than as milestones on a chart. What was submitted, when, to whom, what came back, what is outstanding. The project management guide describes this register in general terms, and in facade work it is close to being the critical path itself, because almost nothing can be manufactured until it clears.
Where fabrication does start ahead of approval, recording that decision and its scope is worth doing, since the exposure is real and it should be a known quantity rather than a discovery.
Each panel is an object with a location and a history
Most construction records quantities. Facade records objects.
A tower may carry several thousand panels across dozens of types, each belonging to a grid position on a floor on an elevation. That identity persists through the whole process, and a great deal of the operational difficulty in this business comes from losing track of it.
Panels get fabricated in type batches for factory efficiency and installed in location sequence for site efficiency, which are different orders. Dispatch has to send what the site can install next, not what the factory finished last. A damaged panel has to be identified, remade and slotted back into a sequence. A revised detail affects a specific subset of types and therefore a specific list of locations.
None of that is manageable as quantities. Two hundred square metres of curtain wall means nothing to a site foreman who needs the panels for grid lines eight to fourteen on the north elevation of floor eleven.
Holding panels as individually identified records with type, location and current state makes dispatch, installation sequencing and damage replacement into ordinary operations. It also makes progress meaningful, because installed panel count against total is a real measure in a way that percentage complete usually is not, which is a rare advantage this trade has over the rest of construction.
Fabricated and not installed is your most expensive state
A panel that has been manufactured and not yet installed is the worst place in the process for it to sit.
The material has been paid for, often imported and paid for in advance. The fabrication cost has been incurred. It is usually not billable until installed, or billable only at a proportion where the contract permits material at site. It occupies factory or site space that is scarce. And it is fragile in a way that steel and concrete are not, so every additional week carries a real probability of damage from handling, storage or another trade.
That combination is what makes it the number worth watching. It differs from the equipment position an MEP contractor carries, because there the constraint is usually procurement lead time, while here it is usually site readiness. Panels accumulate because floors are not ready, hoisting is not available, or the area has not been handed over, none of which the facade contractor controls.
Which makes the figure diagnostic as well as financial. A rising fabricated-not-installed count is evidence about the main contractor's programme, produced by your own factory, and it is considerably more persuasive in a coordination meeting than an assertion that the site is behind.
The workflows a facade contractor runs
- Construction Procurement and Purchase Orders, where imported glass, extrusions and hardware carry the longest lead times of any trade.
- Construction Document Management, covering shop and fabrication drawing revisions that map directly onto panel types.
- Construction Quality and Inspection, covering factory checks before dispatch and field testing after installation.
- RA Billing and Retention, where material at site provisions matter a great deal given where the value sits.
- Measurement and Quantity Tracking, elevation-wise and reconciled against what was fabricated.
- Construction Progress Tracking, where installed panel counts give unusually honest progress.
Why facade contractors choose Pentoggle
Panels as individual records
Type, location and state from design through installation, rather than square metres in a spreadsheet.
Survey against design, before fabrication
Structure readings held against design dimensions with deviations flagged while remaking is still avoidable.
Approvals tracked as waiting items
Samples, mockups and test results with who holds them and for how long.
Factory and site on the same record
Dispatch driven by what the site can install next rather than by what was finished last.
Sits around your accounting
Tally and comparable systems handle accounting, GST and job costing, and they stay where they are.
A useful number for a facade business
Panels fabricated and not yet installed, aged from the date of fabrication.
It is money, risk and coordination in a single figure. Each panel in that state represents cost incurred and not recovered, an object that can be damaged, and a floor that was not ready when your factory was.
Read the ageing rather than the count. A thousand panels fabricated a week ahead of installation is a well run operation. Three hundred panels fabricated eleven weeks ago is a problem in whichever direction it turns out to lie, either a factory running ahead of a programme it should have been reading, or a site that has not given you access it committed to.
Read it by elevation too, since the pattern often concentrates. Panels stuck for one facade of a tower point at something specific, most often hoisting access or a floor handover that never happened.
The figure needs panel-level records rather than area totals. That is the same requirement everything else in this business has, which is why it is the thing worth building first.
Ready to build software for your facade business?
Three thousand panels, each with one place it belongs. Everything else follows from tracking that properly.