"We felt that one area worthy of attention was a study of just how well we performed in carrying out our traditional building methods," explains Brendan Ritchie, the contractor's innovations director. "We selected a scheme we are building in Oxford, in partnership with the Ealing Family Housing Association, and the Calibre team are on site mapping the construction process, monitoring the site and analysing just what is going on every minute of the working day."
Two Oxford Brookes University students, Kevin Clarke and David Ayling, are carrying out the hour tracking and monitoring at Pegasus Court, part of the Blackbird Leys estate. Every 30 minutes one of the pair sets out, Psion in hand, and spends 20 minutes walking the site, noting what every operative is doing, counting waste and photographing what is going on - even what is going into the skips. Initial reaction is usually suspicion, as new subcontractors think they are being spied on, but this soon melts away as their objective becomes clearer. At the end of each working day, the Psion downloads its data to a PC which charts and maps the activity for further analysis.
Willmott Dixon's senior site manager James Batty co-ordinates on-site activities and keeps work flowing in an efficient manner. So if anyone should feel threatened by Calibre's findings it will be Batty, who in fact is now appreciative of the input and feedback. "It is useful for me to have Kevin and David going round and checking everything out - on a large site like this it is impossible for me to know what is happening everywhere all the time and they have often been able to let me know about hold-ups and delays. So besides the benchmarking data being collected, Calibre is also flagging up problems for us and enabling me to respond to them more quickly."
One of the expressed intentions of Calibre is to provide next-day feedback on site activities so performance can be improved there and then, but Batty already runs a pretty tight ship and hasn't seen any particular benefit from this. "In truth, the majority of things that go wrong on site are due to unforeseen events such as suppliers delivering the wrong staircases. You can't plan for such events, and when they do occur, you have to be flexible as to how you deal with them." The conventional response to this is to build slack into the work programme but, until now, no one has been able to identify what the actual level of slack is in a construction schedule. When Calibre's work is finished, Willmott Dixon will for the first time have benchmarks for all tasks which will enable them to programme work more accurately and set their own benchmarks for things like slack periods and materials waste.
Source
Building Homes
