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Today’s construction projects must be more sustainable, delivered sooner and achieve higher standards of quality. These pressures make traditional project delivery, where each part of the process works essentially in isolation, untenable.
The demands are now too great. Sustainability, speed and quality must be delivered for the same or lower cost. So customers and main contractors increasingly look towards modern methods for solutions, even though they are less familiar.
If that’s not an argument for greater partnership working it’s hard to know what would be.
Meeting the demands of modern construction projects means adopting a unified design-develop-deliver process. This relies on selecting methods that support this approach and on having partners who find working together easy and where organisational and functional boundaries are blurred.
The partnership between Innovaré Systems, Mid Group and Bond Bryan illustrates how a main contractor, an offsite specialist and leading design agency can collaborate to de-risk projects and deliver better outcomes.
Underlying the approach is the reality that the benefits of offsite methods are most persuasive when the project is designed as an offsite, SIP-based solution from the outset. This allows designers to take full advantage of the flexibility SIPs bring when deciding on the general arrangement of the buildings along with options such as spans and fenestration.
Expanded Design Options and Pathways
Designing specifically for a proven and robust SIPs solution opens different pathways and options. Collaborating with product engineers from the outset gives greater freedom to design buildings around the needs of users without compromise.
Designing for manufacture also helps to ensure that projects proceed smoothly to guarantee timescales and costs. In practical terms, this level of partnership working means fewer disputes, streamlined communications and faster project delivery.
In the context of education projects, improved process integration has led to quantifiable, practical benefits which include:
- A 20%+ primary energy use saving compared to the DfE target.
- Minimising the use of structural steel, concrete and less sustainable materials.
- Optimised window designs to increase daylight and solar gain, while avoiding overheating the internal pace.
- Options to pre-install windows in the factory to save time and disturbance on site.
Alongside these benefits, projects are easier for customers to procure and manage – with less chance of miscommunication or misunderstandings that cause delays and disputes. We firmly believe that partnerships are the way to deliver better value and outcomes. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing practical case studies to show the approach in action and the benefits it brings.
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