Production quota

It's fair to say that never before has there been such a commitment to change. The 1998 Rethinking construction report by Sir John Egan's task force built on the work of Sir Michael Latham's Constructing the team four years earlier and a raft of Government-backed action programmes followed these two critiques of the industry. Slowly, and it is slowly, things are beginning to improve on Britain's building sites, but the title of Egan's swansong as chair of the Strategic Forum for Construction, last month's Accelerating change report, tells us that the work is not yet done.

But what of the m&e sector? BSRIA's latest site productivity document has monitored four projects that have implemented some of the best practice recommendations laid down in its 1997 report. Not surprisingly, the projects that demonstrated the greatest uptake of BSRIA's 63 suggestions have shown the highest levels of construction site productivity. The message is simple: all you have to do in order to profit from productivity is to apply the measures that have been proven to work.

Nothing in the new report, Site productivity improvements – adoption of best practice recommendations (TN13/2002), should surprise m&e contractors: prefabrication and off-site manufacture, use of innovative components and tools, collaborative working, strategic project management, minimising site activities; the usual suspects are all present and correct. All we need now is wider take-up of these tried and tested practices.

The project was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry and a cross-section of the industry, including several m&e contractors, under the Partners in Innovation programme. The aim is to produce independent, fact-based construction data that supply chains can use to improve the performance of their projects.

BSRIA's team has been given unlimited access to four construction projects, each of which has adopted at least some of the 63 recommendations contained in its 1997 report Improving m&e site productivity. The work draws on BSRIA's expertise in delays and installation rates and analyses the impact that adoption of its best practice recommendations would have on performance.

The four projects cover the whole gamut of construction activity: Christ Church Court, an office block in the City of London; the terminal extension project at Stansted Airport; a new hq for Vodafone in Newbury; and a pair of Living Well health club facilities in Ashford and Perth. The schemes had varying success in pushing the boundaries of site productivity.

The key examples of best practice identified by the report, where project teams reduced installation times to less than 10% of conventionally accepted time frames, were:

• prefabricated mechanical and electrical module installation on the Stansted Airport terminal extension project;
  
• prefabricated plantrooms on the Vodafone project;
  
• prefabricated electrical riser installation on the Vodafone project;
  
• multi-service chilled beam installation on the Vodafone project.

When compared with international site productivity data collected by BSRIA over the last eight years, these parts of the projects have established new best practice performance. The Christ Church study is also worth a mention. While installation largely followed convention, output was up 25% on BSRIA's 1997 benchmarks because the project team significantly reduced delays.

Overall, BSRIA's research identifies four critical success factors that enabled the four monitored projects to improve site productivity:

• convergence between disciplines through more multidisciplinary and collaborative design, manufacture and installation;
  
• stabilisation of the site working environment by minimising delays and reducing rework;
  
• quicker system composition on site through the use of innovative components and tools;
  
• minimisation of site activity through the exploitation of off-site manufacture.

The report relates these successes to its 1997 recommendations and proposes that of the 63 mooted back then, the following have the greatest potential to drive change and improve installation performance:

• a comprehensive constructability review that involves specialist m&e contractors should promote operation efficiency and good access;
  
• designs and specifications presented to site operatives should promote the minimisation of site activities;
  
• prefabrication and pre-assembly should be considered;
  
• standard time-saving components and connections should be used;
  
• the quantity of types and sizes should be rationalised.

Such strategic thinking needs to be more widespread in UK construction, says BSRIA, and the true value of prefabrication and innovative site-based systems is not being fully exploited. For example, the installation of large, prefabricated building services modules relies less on traditional installation skills and more on logistical and material handling skills, and the report blames a lack of appropriately trained site personnel, well-defined modern processes and genuine production-focused collaboration environments for the variability in installation performance.

The report makes it clear that prefabrication, for example, makes planning, co-ordination and control of a construction process even more important than when using conventional techniques. A particular constraint can easily cause installation to cease completely when using the prefabrication approach, but alternative work can often be found when using conventional techniques, which is more flexible because it is made up of many different work elements, often only a few minutes long.

Generally, BSRIA gives the industry a higher mark than it did back in 1997, but concludes that the industry needs to become more aware of innovative products and processes for productivity improvements to become more widespread. Investment is needed in training and education to facilitate this, underpinned by enabling technologies such as bar coding, wearable notebook computers and radio frequency identification tools.

Overall, the need for research into more production-focused processes and products, combined with the development of people capable of delivering innovative ways of working, remains as strong as ever.