Connecting people, production, and information is the real challenge.
Walk into an offsite construction factory, and you can usually find someone who knows why production is behind. Walk into the office, and you may find someone with an entirely different explanation. Sales has another version, purchasing is waiting for answers, and the general manager is trying to determine which problem needs attention before lunch.
Everybody is working. Getting all that work to move in the same direction is where things become interesting.
That is the territory Ben Hershey and 4Ward Solutions Group have chosen to work in. Their business brings together manufacturing advice, design support, workforce resources, automation, factory planning, and software. For an industry where a decision in one department can create three problems in another, that combination deserves a closer look.
A background that started before the consulting business
Hershey is the founder and CEO of 4Ward Solutions Group. His background includes owning and operating manufacturing businesses, and his family’s involvement in the industry helped shape his career. According to the company’s history, he started 4Ward in 2010 after selling his ownership interests in several manufacturing centers. His father, Don Hershey, suggested that he put his experience to work helping other companies.
That progression makes sense. Running a manufacturing business gives a person plenty of opportunities to discover the distance between what should happen and what actually happens. Equipment breaks. Customers change their minds. Good employees leave. A seemingly profitable order can become considerably less attractive once everyone finishes counting what it took to build it.
That experience does not automatically make anyone a good adviser. It does, however, provide a useful starting point when the conversation turns from a presentation to the problems waiting on the factory floor.
The factory’s problems rarely stay in one department
4Ward serves modular, panelized, and structural building-component manufacturers. Its services cover consulting, design, workforce development, robotics and automation, software, and supply-chain support. In its August 2026 announcement of a unified brand identity, the company described a family that includes 4Ward Design, 4Ward Workforce, 4Ward Foundry, 4Ward Factory, and Moducore.
The significance is in how those services might work together. A factory that believes it needs more production workers may first need to address incomplete drawings. A company shopping for automation may discover that inconsistent material delivery is keeping its existing equipment idle. An owner considering expansion may need a clearer understanding of what the current building can produce.
Buying help for each issue separately can leave management responsible for connecting all the recommendations. The design adviser has one plan, the equipment supplier has another, and the software provider wants the company to organize its information before implementation begins. Meanwhile, somebody still has to ship Thursday’s homes.
My reading of 4Ward’s approach is that it aims to help manufacturers deal with those connections. The value would depend on how effectively the team turns its broad capabilities into specific improvements inside each customer’s operation.
Sometimes the answer is better management
Among 4Ward’s listed services are lean manufacturing support, restructuring, operational improvement, and interim management. That gives the company a role in helping existing factories work through problems as well as assisting companies preparing for growth.
This is the less glamorous side of factory improvement, and it is often where the difficult conversations belong. Who has the authority to release a job into production? Who approves a change after materials have been ordered? What happens when sales promises something the production schedule cannot accommodate?
A factory can spend a great deal of money compensating for unclear answers. More overtime, more inventory, and another supervisor may keep things moving, but management should understand what created the need.
An outside team can help when it examines habits that have become too familiar to question. The real test comes when those conversations lead to clearer responsibilities and a production process employees can follow without constantly improvising.
Try the layout before moving the machinery
One of 4Ward’s more tangible offerings is its factory modeling and simulation service. Through 4Ward Factory, the company offers 3D models and simulations for structural-component and volumetric modular manufacturers. Applications include testing layouts, equipment arrangements, and staffing changes, as well as planning new facilities or modifying existing ones. Depending on the scope, a simulation can incorporate time studies.
Anyone who has moved equipment around a working factory can appreciate the appeal. A layout can look perfectly reasonable on a drawing while leaving unanswered questions about material movement, access, storage, and what happens when one operation falls behind.
Simulation lets you examine those questions before committing to physical changes. Its usefulness still depends on the assumptions going into it. A model built around ideal staffing, uninterrupted production, and perfect material availability needs to be challenged before anyone treats it as a dependable forecast.
I would want to see what happens on an ordinary difficult Tuesday. That is when a proposed layout starts earning my confidence.
Where Moducore enters the picture
Moducore is the software business within the 4Ward group. In April 2021, 4Ward acquired the platform from MPE Engineering, adding a system intended to help offsite manufacturers manage information from preconstruction through project closeout.
Its current website describes a cloud-based platform covering customer relationships, design collaboration, production scheduling, work orders, purchasing, inventory, and project coordination. It also offers labor and material tracking by individual, workstation, department, and module, along with tools for quality issues, change orders, and reporting.
That is a substantial range of functions, but the factory owner’s question should be straightforward: Will this help my people make better decisions while there is still time to do something?
Consider a job taking more labor than expected. Knowing that after shipment may help explain a disappointing margin. Seeing the problem while the job is moving through production creates an opportunity to investigate. Perhaps a detail was underestimated, material arrived incorrectly, or a workstation is repeatedly correcting work from an earlier operation.
The information becomes useful when somebody can act on it. Otherwise, the company has found a more sophisticated way to document its frustrations.
Getting people to use the system matters
Moducore lists onboarding, data migration, integrations, and ongoing support among its services. Those are meaningful parts of the offering because introducing software changes how people record, share, and use information.
A production supervisor needs a system that fits the working day. Purchasing needs information it can trust. Management needs consistent reporting, and employees need to understand why entering accurate information is worth their time.
That requires decisions inside the factory. Who owns the data? Who keeps it current? What happens when the new system and somebody’s old spreadsheet disagree? Those questions deserve attention before the company congratulates itself on becoming digital.
The potential advantage of combining manufacturing support with software is that the operational conversations and the technology decisions can inform each other. Whether that potential becomes a measurable benefit depends on each customer's starting conditions and results.
Gary’s Observation
What interests me about Ben Hershey’s approach is the recognition that improving a factory involves several connected responsibilities. People, drawings, materials, equipment, schedules, and management decisions must all work together. Giving one department a better tool can help, but the benefit depends on what happens before and after that department does its work.
4Ward and Moducore offer a broad set of services aimed at that challenge. I would judge their value the same way I would judge any company offering to improve an offsite operation: establish the problem, agree on what improvement should look like, and measure what changes.
Can the factory make promises it can keep? Can supervisors see trouble earlier? Can employees spend more of their day doing useful work? Does management understand where the money is going?
Those answers tell me much more than the number of features in a software demonstration or the size of a consulting proposal. They also get us closer to the question every factory owner eventually has to answer: Is this business becoming better to operate, or simply more expensive to keep running?
