I’ve worked through three different governments - Labour, Coalition and Conservative - but through them all there has been an increasing focus on the importance of infrastructure and transforming construction.. One thing I’ve noticed through this period is that we tend to think of ourselves in the engineering community as being innovators.
This addresses one of the concerns that is often raised about Platforms and modern methods of construction more generally – the spectre of ‘cookie cutter’ buildings and identical assets.Manufacturers can spend less time on the ‘bulk’ components and focus their efforts on the ‘project specific’ parts, and spend more time with customers understanding their individual needs.
This is analogous with use of configurators and Platforms – designers can put more effort into the project specific and value-adding design and less into the documentation of the ‘chassis’.. Can we do this?What should our digital marketplace look like?.Other sectors have grasped the opportunities and challenges faced by e-commerce in different ways and with different levels of success, but it’s now an unavoidable feature of daily life for most businesses and individuals.
It is something that construction should – and can – also be heading towards.There is no question that a digital marketplace for Platforms is achievable; the policy context is in place and there is a growing body of work that would support this.
It’s up to the industry to decide what it looks like.
We should shape this now, proactively, rather than wait for external forces or commercial imperatives to impose something on us..We use a number of strategies – including questionnaires and in-depth workshops with client teams – to gather as much qualitative and quantitative data as we can.
We then review the data, organise, consolidate and present it back to the client, to check our understanding and its validity and accuracy.. Then we identify and agree a number of potential scenarios with the client, which describe a hypothetical future – for example, a change in market direction – from a number of different perspectives; commercial, operational etc.We then look to identify potential solutions or options and evaluate how these perform against the problem statement and value drivers in the agreed scenarios.. We combine a number of clear strategic directions with a systematic exploration of potential improvements at different levels of detail, using the ‘5S method’ as guidance.
This is an established methodology for handling workplace organisation, which breaks the master planning process down into five steps: sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain.. At each stage we determine the appropriate level of detail (resolution) at which to visualise and model, depending on whether we are looking at the whole site or a single unit or process, for example.. We present the options or solutions and our evaluation back to the client and agree whether there are further options to be considered or whether the existing options need to be adjusted.Once an agreed set of options has been identified and developed, we finalise our evaluation, develop recommendations and an output which is a clear and compelling presentation of the findings, and possible next steps.