The fact that construction projects tend to be delivered late is hardly news. Back in 2015, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills published statistics showing that 60% of projects came in late. Was 2015 a particularly bad year? Not really; tracking the data back to 2000 shows that in a typical year only 40-45% of projects were delivered on time. Late delivery is more or less the expectation.
Even when projects are on time this frequently comes at the expense of quality or cash, as overtime and additional resources are thrown at the task to hit a strict deadline.
International research suggests that this isn’t just an issue for the UK. So maybe it’s a question of how we build rather than where we build.
Causes of delays are generally as follows:
- Financial issues.
- Variation orders.
- Slow decision-making.
- Planning and scheduling problems.
- Material management problems.
- Poor site inspection.
- Shortages in labour.
- Delays in drawing.
- Slow contractor’s pace.
- Relationships between project participants.
- Unforeseen conditions (such as weather).
- Design errors.
- Inadequate contractor experience.
A few of these stand out as issues to which panelised offsite construction is much less prone.
Building systems like simplify the construction process and involve fewer trades. Planning and scheduling issues become less of a risk. In turn, this also mitigates much of the risk from skilled labour shortages – once the kit of parts leaves the factory it only needs a small team to assemble it on site. Poor weather is also less of a risk as a watertight structure is quickly assembled from factory-built components.
Panelised offsite construction is a design-led and highly collaborative process (at least it is the way we do it at Innovaré). This helps to build strong relationships between stakeholders around shared project goals. The process fixes the design early and breaks it down into precision-engineered components, which significantly reduces the incidence of reworks and snagging.
Finally, having fewer different contractors involved in the process alleviates the risk of one or more of them lacking the necessary experience. At Innovaré we take this a step further by keeping the design, manufacturing and installation in house. This gives us maximum control of the process and our customers maximum confidence that projects will finish when they are supposed to.
