Project Spotlight: TopHat’s KB Apartment

TopHat is playing a leading role in transforming the home building in the UK, improving quality, reducing costs and protecting the environment.

The company is delivering design-led homes fit for 21st-century living through a unique technology-enabled approach. Creating beautiful and sustainable communities, TopHat is fast becoming Europe’s largest sustainable 3D modular home manufacturers. Their modular homes are designed to be ultra-low carbon to build and much cheaper to run. 

Traditional house building is a messy business. Especially due to unreliable supply chains which leave costs rising, timescales lengthening and quality suffering.

TopHat addresses these problems by manufacturing homes in a controlled environment, removing uncertainties, improving quality and reducing costs. The company’s proprietary technology enables smarter design and ensures that the quality of the product is traced through every step of the manufacturing process.

Taking it a step further to integrate data and analytics into their workstreams, TopHat uses Matrak’s material tracking software to implement end-to-end connected construction capabilities. 

Matthew Udale, TopHat’s Logistics Administrator and his team recently hit their first major milestone, receipting their first delivery by applying Matrak QR codes to their modular built homes prior to being sent to the site. 

When picking items for a production order (POs), TopHat’s logistics and warehouse team use Matrak’s mobile app to easily find production orders and update the statuses and details of the PO’s. 

They are able to assign picks to specific workers which allow team leads to allocate POs to individual employees, with further ability to report on the completion of picks per employee. 

The ability to see the partially completed modules through Matrak’s reporting page helps TopHat’s team to identify which elements are required to complete the build. The option to customize reports through specific filters allows TopHat’s team to generate reports based on information that is required such as daily pick reports, shortages lists & issues registers.

Connected construction helps the industry unlock new value streams. The industry landscape is rapidly evolving as manufacturers, contractors, and participants across the supply chain realize the benefits of, and increasingly deploy, connected construction technologies. 

Technologies like modular building techniques and material tracking systems can help bring assets, people, processes, and job sites onto one platform – making everyone and everything work smarter, reducing downtime, optimising asset utilization and efficiency, and gaining greater visibility into operations.