Power to the workers

Ask anyone who worked for British Leyland in the late 1970s and they’ll tell you what it’s like to drink in the last chance saloon. Thousands of jobs hung in the balance as BL’s saviour Michael Edwardes set about hauling the loss-making combine back from the brink.

The resurrection was short-lived. What the German press has dubbed ‘The English Patient’ is now going through its death throes. Harbingers of doom are already forecasting the end of volume car making in the Midlands, and with it at least 10 000 redundancies.

It would be a foolish industry that thought itself immune from such disaster. And yet the UK construction industry is still merrily squandering millions of pounds every year through poor productivity, wasted materials, and defective workmanship. Sure, we have partnering, pfi and framework agreements, but according to the BSRIA’s latest investigation Uptake of productivity improvements, 30% of the average working day, or £5.1 billion/y, is still being lost on-site¹.

“Our research has shown that 40% of wasted man-hours is due to delays in labour and materials, interference from other trades, and co-ordination problems,” reported BSRIA’s site productivity specialist Glenn Hawkins.

Hawkins has estimated that just a 1% improvement in site productivity would save £170 million/y. To help industry achieve that, the BSRIA has been developing performance and productivity tools to enable contractors to measure their performance and remove barriers to productivity.

The BSRIA has recently been monitoring the site productivity on a new building project at Christ Church Court in London. Trades and site managers were trained to use Performance Measurement Toolkits – booklets containing tearsheets which are used by trades to log the reasons for delays and extra costs. These sheets were gathered by the main contractor and the data fed into the planning process to improve productivity (figure 1).

Between August 1999 and February this year, BSRIA measured the effects of the five major activities that cause delay: materials, tools and equipment, time management (labour shortages and lateness), information, and work area control problems. The latter covers the completion of preceding work, the cleanliness of the area, and whether or not previous work is within tolerance.

“The trades set their targets, in terms of linear metres of product or whatever, and then used the forms to measure what they actually achieved against what they said they would achieve,” explained Hawkins.

Even when they were being monitored, the trade contractors at Christ Church Court still fell prey to all the classic problems of poor co-ordination, conflicting installation activities, and high levels of remedial work. For example, the services risers were to be supported by top-hat sections installed by the dry lining contractor. Unfortunately, the this contractor was incentivised to install the riser enclosures as fast as possible and did not stay within the tolerance required by following trades. Remedial work then had to be carried out before the first services fix.

Similarly the bems and electrical contractors installed cable tray which had to be reconfigured as it conflicted with other services. “This was catastrophic to site performance and was demotivating for the installing tradesmen,” reported Hawkins.

The toolkit reporting sheets identified that 19% of the average working day for an m&e site worker at Christ Church Court was consumed by delays. Average installation performance levels were only 58% of target.

While they have proved very useful aids to measuring productivity, one of the shortcomings of the toolkit is the two to three-day turnaround on information. What is needed, BSRIA concludes, is a tool which not only measures productivity faster, but also has functions to improve performance.

Enter Empower

The BSRIA is currently developing its productivity toolkits as a pc-based application: Empower. Funded by the DETR, the programme will link site performance data gathered by the trades to an activity-based planning, analysis and control tool.

Written in Microsoft Access, the programme is based on a series of dropdown menus. The user starts by inserting the contractors names and details of the relevant work packages.

Once the project starts on-site, the trade contractors can use the performance measuring toolkit to keep track of delays and productivity. Rather than use a paper-based system like the existing toolkit, Hawkins envisages contractors using electronic PalmPilotsTM, with touchscreen technology enabling them to log their activity. The data is then sent on a local radio network to a central server.

BSRIA hopes to be able to include a list of ECA and HVCA-approved trade contractors in the programme, and possibly each contractors’ most recent Key Performance Indicator data from other projects. “KPI data will enable targets to be set for the entire project team,” said Hawkins. “They will know what the world best is, and they will also know the industry average, so clients’ can choose a contractor based on their KPI data.”

This might, for example, enable clients to select a ductwork contractor based on relative installation times for circular ductwork. That information would be imported into the activity based programme, where the site manager can list the package of work, who is responsible for it, and how many hours it will take.

Users will be able to compare their site data against benchmarks from BSRIA’s database of 5000 m&e installation activities, from the installation of central plant down to 2.2 mins for the installation of a screwed pipe fitting (figure 2).

Hawkins envisages that contractors will be encouraged to share a “friendly projects” database, a central pool of performance data on mechanical and electrical installation times. “You could generate a query based on contractors’ performance, either by installation activity or over days, weeks or months,” said Hawkins. “You could even show a contractor’s performance individually or against five or six others.”

Injecting a note of realism, Hawkins admits that the construction industry is nowhere near being able to share information freely. “Even regional offices of the same company are in competition. But the smarter end of the industry is realising that they have to measure performance and identify the reasons why that performance is good or bad, and Empower will help them do it.”

Empower will be tested in September 2000, with the launch scheduled for April 2001. BSJ will carry a full report on the finished program.