The right Calibre

Steve Ellis, Wilcon Homes' site manager for the Millennium house, is better qualified than anyone to talk about its build. Ellis was given just 12 weeks when a Wilcon house would have taken 16-20, and a prototype a great deal more.

Ellis, though, seems to enjoy a crisis. "With this type of house, you get rid of a lot of trades but become more dependent on some, such as good carpenters and good electrical subcontractors.

"One day we had 46 people working on the site, that's too many people in some very cramped spaces. But the amazing thing was that every company on site wanted to be there and the directors of those suppliers wanted to be involved.

If there was any problem of any kind I put a call straight through to the company director and got an immediate response. That took out a whole layer of middle management," he grins.

But monitoring Ellis manage a miracle was a new layer of site management designed to supplement Ellis's persuasive personality and experience with a tool kit that weeds out wasteful practices and benchmarks productivity.

Calibre is the trade-marked first fruit of the Centre for Performance Improvement in Construction at the Building Research Establishment - the latter's acronym neatly forming Calibre's final syllable. The Centre's work is to target wastage and is partly funded with Customs & Excise's receipts from the landfill tax - the first green tax to be hypothecated by the Treasury to protect the environment. Though those at CPIC shudder to admit it, Calibre's roots are in the often ridiculed time-and-motion studies. This time the emphasis is not on catching out individuals but on uniting the site team in improving practice. Calibre is also designed to add value, to find the elements of a build programme that bring profitability and then to redirect as much activity as possible toward those value-adding activities.

The Integer house represents Calibre's first trial in housing and it so impressed Wilcon Homes design director John Weir that he is now to subject the housebuilder to its analysis. CPIC project manager Martyn Baker explains: "Housing is custom-built for Calibre. The repetitive nature of the housing project is exactly the type where Calibre's benchmarking will earn the greatest rewards."

There are two drivers to Calibre. First, everyone on site carries an identifying number on a helmet or jacket which even recognises their skill levels, every part of site is zoned, every supplier tagged with a code and every type of activity categorised. For example, a carpenter's mate passing the carpenter a piece of batten would be "handling materials in situ", the activity categorised as a value-added item and the operative who did so, let's call him "M11", would be performing "H2" in, say, area "G4".

This obsessive categorisation leads to the second driver: codes are easily logged on handheld Psions for downloading later. The idea behind Calibre is not to identify what went wrong after it's gone wrong but what is happening during the process and how it can be improved the next day. So, each morning downloaded information that Calibre project managers logged the day before is printed up as graphs which are pinned to the wall of the site canteen. Each member of the site team is then encouraged to comment on what they identify. "We ask questions at operative level as they know best what happens on site. There is an opportunity for operative input. If you get the graphs up not later than 10am in the staff canteen, they will come and tell you what should be happening," says Baker.

The objective of Calibre is to come up with target ranges for productivity for each trade package for each building type. Once Calibre has logged enough sites, it will be even be able to give benchmarks for what each package in each house type should take in manhours. Concludes Baker: "When you start talking about manhours which you can quantify in pound notes, then people sit up and listen."