Breaking down barriers in MMC

It’s widely accepted that more standardisation and better use of digital solutions could help construction become a more efficient industry, but there are barriers standing in the way. Construction News and IFS gathered a panel of experts to examine what’s stopping us

Roundtable sponsor: IFS

Recent years have seen a push from government, clients and contractors towards greater use of modern methods of construction (MMC), standardised platform approaches and digitisation.

Whitehall has sought to drive these measures through initiatives like the presumption of offsite in public tenders, the government’s Construction Playbook and the mandating of building information modelling (BIM) – at least that’s what the rhetoric says.

The idea is that a construction sector with more standardisation, more use of digital processes and greater delivery through offsite measures will be more efficient and productive.

But a roundtable held in central London by Construction News, sponsored by software provider IFS, heard that despite some clients and contractors enthusiastically taking up these initiatives, many barriers remain.

Late engagement

One suggestion for why MMC has not become as widespread as advocates want is that clients don’t bring contractors into schemes early enough.

“The public sector is starting to get the idea much more than the private sector is, which is still in a race to the bottom”

Scott Tacchi, Sir Robert McAlpine

Sir Robert McAlpine (SRM) head of MMC Scott Tacchi says: “At SRM, we get 80 per cent of our schemes at RIBA stage 3 [once the concept design has been developed] and by then we’ve lost 70 per cent of the opportunity to influence it. We’re left picking at the edges.”

Kier head of MMC Andrew Dewdney says: “A lot of the time the way it comes about is [a client] says, ‘I’ve got a problem, something doesn’t work, MMC will fix it, can you go and fix it’. A lot of the time we can, but if we’d done that from the start we wouldn’t have so much waste. It comes down to maturity and education.”

Brett King, group operational excellence manager at ISG, agrees that early client-contractor engagement is vital. And he calls for standardisation of gauging benefits as well as executing processes. “One of the issues is that the measurement of the success of MMC is a bit varied – there are some outlandish claims about how successful it is,” he says. “I query the validity of it sometimes. Is it always as successful as we say?

“I think the industry could benefit from coming together and coming up with a standardised way of calculating success.”

Public vs private

There is some debate as to which types of clients are most helpful in enabling contractors to make more use of MMC –and the sought-after wider standardisation of processes – in order to become more efficient.

Tacchi, ex-head of MMC at the Department for Education, feels that his former employer – along with other government bodies such as the Ministry of Justice and National Highways – outperform the private sector for MMC and standardising processes.

“The public sector is starting to get the idea much more than the private sector is, which is still in a race to the bottom,” he says.

Others are not so sure. In some public sector works the overall project aspirations of the delivery approach can be difficult to achieve with the procurement approach adopted, says Ger Hayes, managing director UK South at John Sisk & Son. “Sometimes, the aspirations of client organisations and what they are trying to achieve through design guides and playbooks aimed at achieving best practice, on closer inspection do not appear to be aligned with the terms and conditions and the procurement route, driving different behaviours than that intended for excellence and collaboration in construction.” He adds that very little social housing is produced using offsite methods.

Dewdney says that, although there are a handful of mature clients in the public sector, there are many private-sector clients who are more flexible in their approaches and perform well. “When they can see the benefit, they’re happy to talk to us a lot earlier, and that early engagement is the crux of it really.”

“Do we need to join clients together? Is there more that we need to be doing with our supply chain? Do we need to stop going out to thousands [of subcontractors] and rationalise the supply chain?”

Tim Embley, Costain

Having consistent procurement criteria enables the planning needed for contractors to be “able to rationalise, standardise and deliver a better outcome for the client”, says Tim Embley, group research & innovation director at Costain. This is particularly true for clients such as water companies, which have five-year asset management plan (AMP) periods, he adds.

A long-term, consistent and early workload from major clients is helpful, but in order to get the benefits of standardisation, they need to be consistent in what they are seeking from contractors. “I think through the different AMPs and how the requirements changed, there’s been lots of change in the industry [but] consistency is key,” Embley says, adding: “Do we need to join clients together? Is there more that we need to be doing with our supply chain? Do we need to stop going out to thousands [of subcontractors] and rationalise the supply chain?”

Whittling down the supply chain too far, however, could bring new elements of risk into play, warns IFS key account manager Colin Beaney. “One of the things that manufacturing did was go down a single-source supply model. But then when you’ve got supply problems like after the Fukushima [nuclear disaster] or with [semiconductor] chip suppliers, that’s an issue because no one else is available to supply your product,” he says.

Architect issues

The behaviour of other parties is also vital if contractors are to better standardise their processes, not least those designing buildings in the first place. “I hold architects to account for a great deal of the lack of standardisation at the moment,” Tacchi says.

He says that across six hospital projects he has been working on, there are 572 different sets of doors. “One hospital had 36 doors and 30 of them were different. And of that 572, I’ve got 4.6 million colour permutations – that’s mad.”

But aside from clients, architects and supply chain partners, are contractors themselves the real blocker to increasing standardisation, digitisation and efficiency? After all, the sector is not exactly famed for having a culture that is highly digital, keen on standardisation or open to change.

IFS vice president for construction and engineering Kenny Ingram finds construction very different from the other industries his firm sells software to, such as defence and manufacturing.

Defence clients that build aircraft carriers, for example, digitally track every item that goes into the production of the warships, he says.

“Why are there no part numbers in construction?” he adds. “How can you track things if you don’t have an identifier? You can’t properly. These are really simple things that we struggle to understand. It’s just grown to be [people saying] ‘We do things differently every project’. We just get the Excel spreadsheet out and come up with a new set of processes every time.”

Tim Lohmann, director of strategic engineering at Keltbray, questions whether this is a byproduct of the low margins on which the sector operates, though Ingram wonders whether the low margins are leading to the lack of digital awareness or if that lack of awareness causes low margins.

But Lohmann responds: “If the culture is working on low margins and you can’t afford to innovate or to change, then you’ll keep doing what you’ve always been doing.”

Hero problem-solvers

On the other hand, perhaps it’s the type of people working in the industry that drives the rejection of standardisation and a desire to do things differently on every job, argues Vinci Construction quality, improvement & innovation director Yogesh Patel.

“Most of us around this table are engineers in some form, we therefore like being the hero problem-solvers, rather than doing the same as what we did last time in terms of the design and construction,” he says. “We like a challenge, that’s what makes us engineers and therefore we like to do things differently.”

Bringing people into the industry who can offer fresh perspectives is important in overcoming a culture of not wanting to change, says Emily See, highways market director, advisory and analytics at Amey.

“If we’re not changing digitally, we’re not going to attract those young people coming through who have been brought up on iPhones,” she says. “If our culture doesn’t change, the workforce isn’t going to change either because we’re not facilitating a culture that they want to join.”

She also urges a move away from blaming architects or clients and looking at how contractors can work with them better.

Not touching the surface

Several panellists believe that digital processes offer considerable possibilities to radically improve the construction industry.

Sisk’s Hayes is excited by the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI), likening the possibilities of the developing technology to that of smartphones.

“Could you imagine going back 15 years and explaining to yourself what your iPhone would be able to do now?” he says.

AI, he adds, will be able to track people on site, check the right number of toilets are provided, examine specifications, follow materials from factories and more. “I think we’ll be able to embed stuff in components and monitor how they’re behaving. We’ll be able to ask questions like whether things need maintenance or if pumps are running. I don’t think we’ve even begun to touch the surface on what we can do digitally.”

Hayes believes that this will not be driven mainly by boardroom executives, but by younger innovators coming into construction. “Some of the people coming in at the grassroots level that are making the biggest difference with digital already, they’re young, they’re techy,” he says. “We need to attract more young, diverse people into the industry.”

Alun Griffiths’ pre-construction director Simon Dunn says his firm is gaining big results after recently introducing telematics to monitor data from vehicles.

He explains that after the fuel-price rises and removal of the red-diesel rebate last year, the firm made better use of the tech, and the rewards have been “unbelievable”.

Dunn adds: “Being a civils contractor, we do a lot of our own earthworks so we’ve got all of our own kit and the amount of data that we’ve got is just staggering.

“We’ve had [the kit] for years and had just never used it. Now we’re starting to use it, our productivity is going [right up].

“We even track things like whether machines are running in power mode – which is the equivalent of having an additional driver – or in eco mode.”

Lohmann says Keltbray uses similar technology and offers incentives to drivers to reduce idling times, which saves fuel, money and carbon for the contractor.

The current and future benefits of making more of digital and standardisation are tangible. Will contractors, along with other players in the industry, grasp them?