This is the age of disruption and with digital technology becoming ever more a feature of every aspect of our lives, I believe it is only a matter of time before a BIM company becomes a tier 1 contractor.
After all, the construction industry is essentially a sophisticated and elastic mechanism for risk/reward allocation, based on the co-ordination of financial, material, human and equipment resources.
The industry continues to look backwards over its shoulder at lowest-cost approaches
Operating within the context of a free-market economy, this creates opportunities for the creative destruction and re-birth of new operating models. The demise of Carillion creates the opportunity to reflect on the shortcomings in the standard UK main contractor business model, and to imagine new ways of doing things.
As any financial planner will tell you, past performance is no guide to future reward. This makes it prudent to look beyond existing contracting models, methods of risk allocation and project delivery. Put simply, can we re-imagine a new tier 1 contractor model?
The lowest-cost approach to decision-making is often called up as the biggest barrier to change within our industry, inhibiting long-term industry investment in skills, innovation and best-value whole-life outcomes. Forms of contract continue to evolve, but in the style of fashions that come and go, the industry continues to look backwards over its shoulder at lowest-cost approaches without ever fully quantifying best-value and committing to a new contractual paradigm that can transform output and efficiency.
This veneer of change and evolution extends to design. While most firms now use 3D BIM software to generate models, it is still common to see drawings being touched up and co-ordinated in 2D AutoCAD or another data environment like Navisworks. Despite the use of COBIE-style standard details etc, BIM as we currently use it is simply the evolution of CAD, which is itself not fundamentally different from drawing with a pencil on a board. Trade contracts do not mandate that all project contributors work in a common data environment, and typically throw the burden of clash detection onto the tier 2 trade contractors, oftentimes requiring them to re-model, re-draw and re-coordinate the contract drawings. This is absurdly inefficient.
Aside perhaps from Laing O’Rourke, no one has really envisioned a new contracting model that is enabled by technology and unencumbered by the baggage of existing working practices. It would be near-impossible for an existing company to change its whole way of working quickly, encumbered as it would be by the baggage of existing staff, skills and ongoing projects. However, an agile start-up would not face these same obstacles.
BIM has the capability to evolve into something that is truly revolutionary and change this; that is parametrically based 6M BIM that is fully design-coordinated, construction-sequenced, suitable for quantity and cost measurement, and most importantly is manufacturing-ready. Overlay this with ongoing efforts to introduce whole-life costs as a 7th BIM dimension, and the likelihood that manufacturing-ready means having material supplies linked directly to factories working within a just-in-time pull-type procurement framework, and it becomes clear that BIM and the concept of a digital twin will likely become the cornerstone for project delivery.
This is further reinforced by the Treasury-championed, ICE-led, Project 13 initiative, which has an integrator at its core to align and incentivise project teams. Since risk can be managed by powerful and effective BIM techniques, and that this is the direction of travel for the industry, is a risk as we currently assess really going to be a risk in the future? This will surely change and evolve, and a construction-enabled 7D BIM environment will provide an opportunity to better-quantify design, coordination, and construction schedule risks. This will be the role of the project integrator.
Successful tier 1 contracting should involve project integration, albeit it is rarely practiced in the manner envisaged by Project 13. Therefore, in an evolving market with space for differing contracting styles there is likely space for ambitious contractors, architects, engineers and BIM leaders to embrace risk and better manage it, rather than running scared in the opposite direction. Tier 1 and trade contractors will obviously embrace new technologies and ways of working, but in this context, it is not unimaginable that a new type of main contractor will emerge, re-imagining the tier 1 model with a modern digitally-driven construction ethos.
We are working with one such company that has evolved in this way. It started out as a BIM-coordination and modelling company and has evolved into a main contractor. Interestingly the company is Italian, yet it’s here, in the UK, and elsewhere internationally, having grown in a market that could be viewed as less BIM-savvy than the UK. I would hypothesise that it will not be the last, and that the creative forces of capitalism and technology will give rise to new types of main contractor who have not trodden the traditional trade to tier 2 to tier 1 path.
Paulo Silva is director at Robert Bird Group
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