Ready for take off

Constructing Excellence can offer a broad range of benefits to clients, and it is important to view these within the context of the enormous steps forward that have been taken by the industry. Clients have a very important role to play within the industry, and Constructing Excellence offers them an opportunity to understand how they can obtain best performance from their supply chain.

The implementation of best performance can have a great impact on construction projects, and Constructing Excellence is able to demonstrate how to achieve this through emphasizing the importance of various factors, such as early involvement, outsourcing and partnering, among other issues.

Highlighting the importance of partnering, for example, encourages long relationships between firms, and creates an environment where both parties can learn and tailor their construction activity in order to drive value.

Another important issue that Constructing Excellence emphasizes is innovation. The idea of continuous improvement implies advancement in steady increments, whereas innovation is moving forward in bigger steps. Constructing Excellence seeks to pool experience and develop ideas that will bring about innovation that will then, in turn, become best practice.

Constructing Excellence also encourages the idea of benchmarking as a means of improving businesses and, as a result, the industry as a whole.

By measuring their performance against other businesses and aiming to achieve targeted improvement, the standards within the industry are raised. Constructing Excellence’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) give businesses a means of measuring their performance and consequently establishing targets to work towards.

There are two dimensions to Constructing Excellence. The first is as the centre of what is best practice in construction, acting as a fulcrum for the industry and disseminating information and expertise. The second is the role it plays in continuing to challenge the industry. As a client, it is easy to recognise the improvements that have been made, but there is still a way to go.

The Constructing Excellence best practice knowledge base offers a number of drivers for change and targets for improvement as well as strategic objectives for businesses to work towards.

The T5 agreement has built on those platforms and they have very much become the T5 way of thinking. In the building stage, which is now underway, T5 is focusing on integrated supply chains, offsite component manufacture and a dedicated leadership team, for example.

All the key elements of the Rethinking Construction report are represented, as this is what drives the BAA approach to construction.

As Group Technical Director, Richard Petrie is responsible for BAA’s £450m capital expenditure programme (excluding Terminal 5), for the overall design and delivery of construction projects across all seven UK airports and for group supply chain activities