Building
Services Consultants
The fragmented structure and work practices of
the construction industry continue to inhibit progress to high
performance, according to one of its most senior figures.
At the annual JCT Povey Lecture last week, more than 100 industry
leaders heard Bob White, chairman of Constructing Excellence in the
Built Environment, non-executive chairman of Mace and chief
executive of Building Futures Limited, give a presentation entitled
Innovation in the Change Agenda. He said: “This fragmentation is
well demonstrated by the structures within the industry, as well as
the way work is organised on construction sites.
"There remains the old chestnut of the divide between design and
construction, as well as the multiplicity of organisations which
have to be brought together and orchestrated into a single team to
achieve even the most straightforward of projects.”
Bob White also said that construction reform, which had now been
going on for more than a decade, had reached a stage “where the
philosophy of collaboration (i.e. partnering/integrated team
working) is accepted by most major industry organisations.
“Leading clients, most regular users of the industry, both public
and private, have accepted that the most successful way of
harnessing the power of this collaboration is through frameworks –
of a variety of shapes, sizes and duration.”
Bob went on to outline eight benefits of framework agreements and
how they promote higher performance and innovation:
• Clients can use them as significant drivers of change.
• They result in reduced competitive bidding/long term
relationships.
• Innovations and cost savings can be delivered through supply chain
relationships.
• They will deliver continuous improvement agendas.
• Long term collaboration on capital programmes and long term
service revenues boost margins.
• They help to spread the overhead over a larger workload and
produce fewer loss-making projects (less risk, less volatility).
• They can improve performance based reward mechanisms.
• They encourage deeper relationships between
clients/contractors/supply chain demanding new upstream and
downstream skills.
Echoing the importance of framework agreements, the JCT had
announced at its annual conference last month that it is about to
publish its new JCT Framework Agreement. Bob White said: “The JCT, I
am pleased to acknowledge, are ‘on the case’.”
Bob described how the construction industry is not viewed as being
particularly innovative, a view with which he only partly agreed. He
said: “Construction firms have always displayed a capability for
innovation. The specific nature of on-site assembly particularly,
with the many different organisations and specialisms, varieties of
products and processes and the customisation of nearly every project
has bred into the sector an innate ability to innovate. Despite
this, however, we are not viewed as an innovative sector. This is
probably because the way in which we innovate does not lead to
lasting improvements in performance across the industry.”
Concluding his lecture, Bob left those assembled in no doubt that
they were part of a great industry, one which was well on the path
to completing its reform: “I do not need persuading about how good
our industry can become. I have seen examples of world class
performance for many years now.
“We have it within our grasp, I believe, to change finally the
behaviour of our industry from short term to long term, to be a
skilled sector with new skills, to use technology and new materials
to drive home a manufacturing paradigm in appropriate areas of the
sector and, by so doing, to reduce construction costs. We can, and
should, make a significant contribution to the societal, economic
and environmental challenges of our age and by so doing, enhance the
industry’s reputation and make it a magnet for young people as a
workplace of choice.
“All we need to do is to be more innovative. In an era of extensive
innovation, we will find the ways to deliver all these benefits and,
who knows, perhaps even how to be more profitable other than simply
by charging more! I have great hopes for our future for, as someone
once said, “the one natural resource that the world still has in
infinite quantity, is human ingenuity”.
Email:
meh@chelgate.com
|
Editor's Note: Joint Contracts Tribunal
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Joint Contracts Tribunal - Frameworks the cure for fragmentation
Arundel Jones Associates Ltd News Categories : Building Services Consultants |