Ben Carlisle, Global Practice Leader, DfMA
As the new government prepares to ramp up the UK’s infrastructure spending, the construction industry is facing significant challenges. How can it meet the government’s stated ambition to deliver major infrastructure in half the time, with half the carbon, and for two-thirds of the cost? How about with an increasing skills shortage?
It’s clear that we cannot do it just by tweaking the way that we currently work - the only way of doing more is to do things very differently.
One thing that needs to change is the obsession with one-off projects, where everything is seen as special and bespoke. It’s this mindset that leads us to be constrained by the traditional project management triangle where cost, quality and time are interlinked. This dictates that if you want to deliver something of quality, you have to either take longer, or accept higher costs, or both. On the other hand, if you emphasise the need to do something quickly, then quality and cost will suffer. And so on.
The way to break this relationship is to concentrate on process. We have to do things in a better way. I believe that Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) combined with other modern methods of construction, is a big part of the answer to that challenge.
DfMA as a concept has been around for many years, but its interpretation in the industry seems to vary. There is a misconception that DfMA is all about offsite construction. In fact, DfMA is a collaborative design approach, a process that makes things easy to make and easy to put together (ideally including commissioning and handover) in addition to meeting in use requirements. It is agnostic of the way assets are delivered, focusing only on making that delivery process better. It enables offsite construction and makes it more effective, but the two are different things, and just because you have one it does not mean you have the other. A bridge, for example, will very likely be built offsite, because it is too large to be built in situ, but this does not mean that it is easy to make or put together - it could be an absolute nightmare.
A focus on process should unlock a more collaborative relationship with the supply chain. If the engineer designs something and then throws it over to a contractor, then even if that contractor is involved as early as possible, they are still fundamentally taking that design and then figuring out how to make it. You are therefore reliant on the team you assemble at that time having the skills and experience to build the design in the best way, or to identify where the design needs amending.
By contrast, if we as designers started with an understanding of how something will be made, and the scheme was designed to suit that method of construction, then the quality of what is produced will depend on the design, which is where we want to be.
Getting to that point requires an understanding of how to minimise the parts required for construction, how to make things easy to assemble, and a more explicit understanding of the plant and processes used during construction and their implications on cost, time and quality.
This is easier said than done, of course, and a major obstacle to acquiring that knowledge is to do with the way the industry is structured. Supply chains are fragmented, and everyone has a specialism. Tier 1 contractors may be reluctant to engage the supply chain until they have enough detail from the designer to have some certainty about what they are dealing with. So you end up in a chicken and egg situation, where you can’t engage the right supplier until you have a detailed design, but by the time that has happened you have gone too far for them to have sufficient influence.