Transport and the Regions Rethinking Construction |
|
|
Standardisation and Pre-Assembly |
|
Volumetric Ltd designs and manufactures prefabricated units which can be incorporated in a variety of buildings, including Forte's Travelodge, speculative housing and housing association developments, military accommodation, private hospitals and top of the range self-build houses. Advantages include speed of construction, lower cost, reduced need for skilled labour and achievement of zero defects. McDonald's Restaurants have demonstrated an ability to construct a fully-functioning restaurant on site in 24 hours, using a very high degree of prefabrication and modularisation.The design allows expansion or even relocation. |
|
Performance Improvement Tools and Techniques |
|
CALIBRE has been developed by BRE as a simple but effective system for mapping and understanding site processes and measuring and comparing on-site performance. Using hand-held computer technology feeding back to a lap top computer it provides real-time feedback to site managers to help them remove barriers to productivity, eliminate waste and improve value-adding activities. Value management is a structured method of eliminating waste from the brief and from the design before binding commitments are made. Value management is now used by up to a quarter of the construction industry to deliver more effective and better quality buildings, for example through taking unnecessary costs out of designs, ensuring clearer understanding of the brief by all project participants and improving teamworking. Value management can also reduce costs by up to 10%. Benchmarking is a management tool which can help construction firms to understand how their performance measures up to their competitors' and drive improvement up to 'world class' standards. Taywood Engineering Ltd are using benchmarking in a project to identify a strategy for achieving zero defects in construction, including the principles of a 'zero defects culture' and a range of possible tools, such as the concept of a 'stop button' in site production, to prevent defects "going down the line". |
Great Scope for Improvement
- Leading clients working with the best construction companies are successfully combining many of these developments to achieve significant improvements in the cost, time and quality of projects. But there is plenty of scope for further improvement at the leading edge of the industry and for these improvements to be spread across the industry and offered to the vast majority of occasional and inexperienced clients. The Task Force is strongly of the view that there is nothing exceptional about what major clients are doing to improve performance in construction. Anybody can do it, given the time, the commitment and the resources.
Direction from Major Clients
- In construction the need to improve is clear. Clients need better value from their projects, and construction companies need reasonable profits to assure their long-term future. Both points of view increasingly recognise that not only is there plenty of scope to improve, but they also have a powerful mutual interest in doing so. To achieve the performance improvements required there is a pressing need to draw all the promising developments in construction together and give them direction. The Task Force believes that this direction and the impetus for change must come from major clients. In the next section we, as representatives of major clients, set out the basis of this direction through our ambition to create a thoroughly modern construction industry.
Published 16 July 1998