Ron Lang is Regional Director of AtkinsRéalis
The construction industry relies heavily on an ‘engineer to order’ (ETO) delivery approach, not surprising given the scale, complexity and context-based nature of the deliverables it delivers. Unfortunately, this approach encourages constant reinvention of the products we deliver and the production methods we use to deliver them.
I strongly believe that the continued dominance of traditional craft-based construction methods that we often deplore is an entirely understandable and rational response to this approach. Simply put, you need to rely on flexible materials, highly skilled people and high levels of on-site manufacturing to bring largely bespoke, and often untested, designs to life. Accordingly, I would like to reframe the current debate, recognizing that traditional construction methods are not the root cause of our problems, but merely a logical response to our entrenched ETO delivery model.
It seems to me that for too long we have focused on changing the methods we use within our existing delivery model, wrongly crediting the technologies and processes employed in the automotive and aerospace sectors as the reason for their success, in instead of being a feature of their success. delivery model This anomaly is evident in our current political landscape of “modern construction methods” (MMC) and, perhaps most prominently, in the “foreign presumption.”
Introduced in 2019, the offsite presumption requires all social infrastructure projects to develop at least one option that involves substantial use of off-site manufacturing during the option development stage. In practice, these projects are still largely designed to order, and consideration of off-site manufacturing comes too late, requiring manufacturers to produce relatively bespoke solutions, usually at low volume. Given these conditions, the feasibility of off-site manufacturing, both for the project and industry, is very limited. It is therefore not surprising that, despite steady progress in recent years, this approach has not been successful in driving fundamental changes at the sector level.
A different way
So is there an alternative? Well, it seems increasingly clear to me, especially when we look beyond the UK, that we need to take a more holistic approach to transformation. This is why the concept of industrialized construction has potential: the idea is growing globally and provides a more useful starting point for the change we seek.
Simply put, construction industrialization focuses on eliminating unnecessary variability in delivery processes to enable economies of scope and scale while driving continuous improvement. It encourages us to move away from the ETO approach and look for opportunities across programs and portfolios to drive greater similarity and repeatability in what we deliver and how we do it.
To offer a practical example, the ‘platform’ agenda that has emerged in recent years is a good step in this direction. The platform agenda encourages us to focus on harmonizing, digitizing and streamlining requirements across entire programs and work portfolios so that repeatable common components, processes and relationships can be developed and deployed at scale .
It also helps shift the conversation away from standardization and mass production (terms often negatively associated with industrialization) and toward commonality and mass customization. At the end of the day, platforms in all their forms always try to balance the benefits of the common with the need for personalization.
Numerous encouraging examples of this approach are also emerging. For example, the Ministry of Justice has worked with its supply chain to develop a standard “kit of parts” that can be configured to produce a range of block designs. This not only drives economies of scope and scale to your capital investment program, but provides the stability needed to drive continuous improvement in delivery from design configuration to procurement, production of components, logistics and assembly.
This platform approach is also expected to bring significant value to the operational customer as maintenance and refurbishment operations become increasingly repeatable and replacement components can be produced at scale and installed efficiently by a mature supply chain.
The key point here is that by adopting a broader industrialized construction agenda, we can focus on creating the enabling conditions for the adoption of manufacturing technologies and processes. This is a socio-technical challenge, not merely a technical one, and we must resist the temptation to rely on inventing and reinventing technologies and manufacturing processes as this has no lasting impact.
The success we see in other industries lies in their ability to eliminate unnecessary variation, and it is this characteristic that has allowed them to adopt highly productive production methods. As long as the construction industry depends on perpetual reinvention, a similar degree of progress and transformation will continue to elude us.
