Quality & QbD

Quality by Design (QbD) is an industry keyword these days – spoken equally with reverence and frustration by those trying to understand how to implement it. QbD is a system of tools that assures quality is built into the design throughout the process, rather than inspecting it in, testing it in, or bearing costly changes to get it right after the fact.

Guidance publications have provided descriptions of QbD tools that can be used to move from a traditional, empirical development approach to an enhanced QbD approach, but many companies are overwhelmed by a sense of complexity of doing so. While it is the discretion of each company to chose which approach they use, clearly the focus is on QbD – and the benefits of doing so are immense.

Benefits of QbD

“In the last 15 years, some companies in the automotive sector have moved from 5 digit outgoing PPM levels to double or single digits using QbD tools. It doesn’t happen overnight, but initial gains can be made quickly and they continue to gain momentum as usage matures,” Wilson states, based on her own experience as an International Quality Director.

“The QbD tools being recommended are the same tools that have been used in many industries in their Product Development Process (PDP). By embedding the QbD tools into their PDP framework, Gate Reviews and procedures, they have become standard practice throughout their organisations.”

QbD offers the possibility of some very attractive advantages in Pharmaceutical :

• Flexibility and Cost Savings – Exhibiting an enhanced knowledge of product performance over a range of material attributes, manufacturing options and process parameters yields an expanded design space. This enables continual improvement of the manufacturing process within that design space without further regulatory review, increasing quality and productivity without additional cost.

• Risk Management & Knowledge Management – Tools like FMEA define potential risks and assign risk priority numbers to focus attention on resolving highest risks and preventing design or process defects from occurring. Besides preventing possible failures, this builds a knowledge base for future similar products, allowing faster designs and better results.

• Defect Prevention – Control strategies including Real Time Release Testing ensure quality of in-process or final product based on real time data – preventing production defects before they occur, improving quality, minimizing waste and saving money.

• Re-engineering of Current Products – Knowing where to step back into the process allows usage of a selection of tools to quickly and easily improve the current design, and utilizing the knowledge base means they can be designed faster, with more certainty and with the potential of less regulatory testing.

Challenges of QbD Implementation

Unfortunately, many companies are unfamiliar with the QbD tools described, struggle to define how QbD fits with their current PDP, or are unsure how to implement QbD in a way that will satisfy their internal quality representatives and regulatory authorities.

QbD is a ‘system’ of tools that interlink and flow, progressively building on knowledge gained to produce the best design, process and control strategy to achieve the Quality Target Product Profile (QTPP) and performance intent. Therefore, training is essential for company’s multi-functional personnel so that the philosophy, usage and application are congruent and understood.

QbD fits best within a well-defined PDP. At a minimum, an organisation needs an established PDP that meets the following – or the PDP should also be revised or improved.
• A clearly defined, common and disciplined approach to design and deliver product – from concept through commercialization – that begins with customer and business objectives.
• A multi-functional approach that assures involvement at the right time on the right activities, and facilitates simultaneous tasks via concurrent engineering.
• Gate Reviews to assure the right deliverables and quality are met and agreed before exiting to the next stage.
• A process that is flexible and scalable, enabling the same effectiveness for re-engineered current product as for new products.
• A means of capturing knowledge for reuse in other similar projects – enabling speed, certainty and quality.

Finally, often, people just can’t “see” how QbD fits with the PDP. The guidance documents are descriptive, but not pictorial or visual.

Make QbD Visual and Integrated into Your PDP

“A lesson learned from other industries is that to be embraced effectively, QbD must be made easier to understand – that is, visual – in order to make the complex more manageable,” she states.

What is needed is an approach that clearly and simply communicates when to use QbD tools in the PDP, how tools interrelate and what happens next.

This requires:
1. A high level PDP, indicating key phases of work in a time progression across the top, and function or activity bands along the side specifying major activities to be completed in each stage. Second level definition specifies tasks required per activity, and a third level defines the procedure of how to do each task.
2. Understanding of the QbD tools and their linkages from concept through commercialization
3. Defining and visualizing where QbD tools are used within the phases of the PDP
4. Defining the Standard Work, Standard Management & Visual Management to sustain the permanent culture change you desire.

Understanding the QbD tools and linkages are shown in Figure 1: The Requirements Flow-down Matrix (RFM). The RFM depicts how development tools flow through a PDP. Elements of QbD are integrated into each phase of the RFM. Tools are executed left to right using rolling wave planning. However, timing planning and analysis occur from right to left to verify the integration and linkages.

An example of placing the QbD tools within a PDP is shown in Figure 2: QbD in PDP. Every company has their own PDP with their own defined phases. This is a high level view of how it might be organized.

Benefits are Worth the Effort

QbD is not simple. But implementing it, understanding it and making it part of your normal operating process does become easier and faster if you make QbD visual and embed it within a clearly defined and structured PDP.

While integrating QbD into your PDP initially takes time to develop and implement, and evolves in effectiveness as used, the benefits are immense and quickly apparent. Within a short time, it transforms your way of doing business, and after the metamorphosis, no one in the organization could imagine doing business any other way.

Cindi Wilson is Director of Quality Transformation, Supply Development & Customer Satisfaction at Total Flow Limited. Her career has included being an International Director of Quality and Customer Satisfaction within the automotive industry, and Vice President Global Supplier Quality within consumer electronics.

Clients wish that construction could be like other advanced industries: easy to buy from; full of ideas to meet their special needs; integrated to need no customer leadership. In more than three years spent in construction Total Flow have found no examples where this aspiration is met.

BAA had a very demanding set of needs for Terminal 5 and did not have confidence in the construction industry’s ability to meet them.  Their solution was to take control and become an ‘expert client’ with some considerable success, but this was certainly not an ‘easy to buy’ option; nor did it deliver perfection in cost or speed.  The approach was internal resource hungry and BAA have now moved away from being an ‘expert’ to an ‘enlightened’ client.

The other extreme is to trust the construction industry to deliver best value as an ‘expert supplier’.  Repeat clients will give examples of where improvements have been made with iterative designs or processes, but Total Flow are yet to find a construction client who can candidly declare that they have achieved even close to optimum value on a supplier led build programme.

There must be a route for repeat or one-off clients to getting the same feeling of control and value from a construction project as they do from a visit to the supermarket; ordering from Amazon; or buying a new car.

Total Flow are actively building a network of construction innovators from clients, contractors and consultants to material suppliers and logistics providers.  The goal is to develop a robust process which helps establish clients’ needs and translates them into a specification for building design, materials, process and logistics.  We will then create a robust, waste free Construction System capable of repeatably meeting clients’ needs.  It may not deliver perfection in the first instance; but with a standard process it can be measured, improved and rapidly break the paradigm that construction is so different that Lean Thinking does not apply.

How would you define construction value?  When can we map out the process which will maximise it for client, contractor and consultants?

[1] http://www.saxoncbe.com/ncrisp-think-piece.html

One question that keeps nagging away at me is what is the objective in construction we are seeking to solve with lean or sigma approaches and frameworks?. Safety? Quality? On time delivery? Cost? Cost certainty? Robust engineering? Systems engineering? Building performance? The same for less? More for the same? More for less?

Increasingly lean is framed has having two perspectives: Left to Right and Right to Left. Left to Right lean Thinking looks to the current process, identifies the causes of systemic waste and seeks to eliminate the cause to enable the synchronised flow of information and materials within standard processes.

In contrast Right to Left Lean Thinking looks to the market and asks what innovation in proposition are we seeking to provide our clients and then uses lean frameworks to design end to end waste free capability.

In what circumstances might these approaches appeal to the construction industry? Where and when would it be desirable to be more speedy? More flexible? More dependable? Less expensive? Of a higher performance?

Lean thinking and DFSS (Design for Six Sigma) might enable anyone of these outcomes but adopting lean ideas and tools per se does not necessary mean we achieve anyone of these outcomes in particular.

My personal belief is that the goal of any lean system is to produce precisely what is required, when it is required, defect and accident free, at a target cost. Our challenge is only then to figure out how in any set of circumstances that might be achieved.

What makes construction interesting is that the outputs are infinitely variable but the inputs and processes employed are either highly standardised (building products) or have the potential to be so, but the “employees” have a nasty habit of moving on and/or attempt to work in 2 or 3 “factories” simultaneously, making tight synchronisation a challenge.

Perhaps our focus should be to use lean thinking and DFSS to render the peculiarities of the industry irrelevant. Once we have this licked our only challenge might be to figure out what social structure is necessary to enable safe repeatable standardised work and knowledge transfer.

My final thought: One thing I have to continually remind my team of is our goal should not be to rescue the construction industry any more that it is to fix the entire world of manufacturing. Our goal is to help those that want to be helped to learn how to apply a few simple ideas to keep their people alive and well, improve the quality of what they do and return more value year on year to their clients and owners.

Challenges and builds?

Quality through the decades has been an adventurous evolution for those who’ve lived through it … not for the faint of heart, the action adverse or those afraid of culture and business change.  These changes have affected what we expect, what we buy, and even what we tell our friends, family and extended social networks.

Today’s global economy and technology explosion create even more challenges to be addressed: increased expectations, increasingly complex products, shorter timescales, while making the consequences of failure much more severe.  In addition, there are new challenges : labor/social laws, green/environmental sustainability, banned substance and counterfeit vigilance and reputations that can change in minutes due to Internet viral communication.

Let’s take a quick journey at the changes in Quality over the pivotal decades of the 1980’s to 2010:

(Note:  While some industries and some geographic locations were more advanced during this time, the following represents the journey of most industrial manufacturing segments outside of Japan.  Foundations of Lean and Six Sigma have been part of the Toyota Production System since the 1950’s.)

1980’s

“World Class Manufacturing” was the 1980’s keyword, and companies were attending workshops on the Toyota Production System (TPS) and Total Quality Management (TQM).  Just-in-time, waste reduction and process mapping had just begun.

While Deming’s SPC tools and Points for Management had been around since the 1950’s, they had largely been ignored.  However, with the success of his work in Japan and his book “Out of the Crisis” in 1982, companies were trying to implement Quality Circles, control charts and SPC.  Internal First Time Quality levels (FTQ) were either not measured or poorly measured, and external quality measures were usually 4 digits or more in Parts Per Million (PPM) or DPMO – (although normally measured in percent, as PPM was just too mind-boggling).  While Six Sigma was being initiated in Motorola, it would be another decade before it became a culture-changing tool in most other companies.

Manufacturing plants weren’t very good at knowing the real quality levels they were receiving from their suppliers, and long-term contracts made them slow to demand improvement and slower to remove business.

Consumer product quality was unreliable.  Frustrated consumers didn’t expect their products to last much beyond the warranty period, and producers weren’t very responsive in resolving problems even during the warranty period.  However, Consumer reporting agencies were beginning to compare and print failure rates, complaints and customer satisfaction … awakening consumer awareness and influencing purchase decisions.

1990’s

In the 1990’s, the keyword changed to “Lean Manufacturing”, with the introduction of Tom Womack’s book “The Machine That Changed the World.”  Likewise, Jack Welch brought Six Sigma into GE in 1995, and into mainstream thinking.

While new concepts were being implemented, change takes time – especially culture change – and real performance changed gradually.  External quality measures were usually still in 3 digit PPM, but companies were beginning to make the mental change from percent to PPM.

Manufacturing plants increased expectations for their suppliers, but their tolerance was still long, often giving a troublesome supplier a year or more to turn around results.  Consumer expectations were increasing and producers were beginning to feel the pressure of consumer report comparisons.

2000’s

In the 2000’s, Six Sigma was common terminology, enhanced by Jack Welch’s book “Jack: Straight from the Gut” in 2001.  Now companies struggled with a new dilemma – deciding whether to implement Lean or Six Sigma – mistaking them as mutually exclusive concepts.  By 2004, Mike George coined the term “Lean Six Sigma”, integrating the two tools.

In addition, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and Robust Engineering were being introduced as techniques to optimize the design during development, rather than improving after production.  Indeed, with the fast evolution of new electronics features, the first run might be the only run before the product changed again – and profitability could depend completely on initial quality with no possibility of later improvement.

Inspired companies were now producing in 2 digit or single digit PPM, with a growing focus on Cpk as a measure of process capability to prevent defects from occurring, and dedicated programs to move distributions from 1.33 (4 sigma) to 1.67 (5 sigma) to 2.0 (6 sigma).

Manufacturing plant tolerance of poor supplier quality had significantly decreased; with 6 month or 3 month improvement horizons before financial penalties or business re-sourcing were initiated.  In addition, annual price reductions and global outsourcing became the norm.

Consumers had enhanced expectations of their products working well beyond the legal warranty period, and companies who offered free extended warranties enjoyed a marketing advantage over their competition.

Global service and customer satisfaction and environmental awareness were also expanding.  In 2000, ISO-9001 Quality Management System was revised to include customer satisfaction elements for both manufacturing and service industries, and became a universally accepted quality system certification.  Likewise, ISO-14001 was revised in 2004 to further define the standards of an Environment Management System to operate in an environmentally sustainable manner.

So Where does that Leave us Today?

We’ve come a long way … and hopefully you’ve kept pace with the changes.  However, in today’s competitive environment, it isn’t enough to just keep pace – you need to be remarkable:

• Manufactured quality needs to be at or near Six Sigma levels in order to remain cost competitive in a global economy.
• Lean principles should already be well implemented – because they not only reduce throughput time and eliminate waste – they also facilitate quality improvement and allow abnormal conditions to be easily detected.
• Not only do consumers expect perfect quality out of the box, they also expect it to last.  Extended warranties are assumed.  Design for Six Sigma and Robust Engineering applied at the development phase are critical to assuring the product will endure the stresses of use – under more and more varied conditions.
• Product users also want faster response and better service when there are issues, and on-line help and manuals.  Moreover, if they don’t get it, they are prepared to tell not just 10 friends, but also the entire world.
• Consumers also expect that even though products have more features, options and complexity, they should be user friendly and nearly intuitive in use.  In addition, Consumers expect that products can be modified or upgraded to new software versions or product generations.  Flexible, adaptable, expandable and serviceable are key words – as well as “common” for mating part interfaces.
• Extended supply chains cross continental borders.  As product complexity and cost pressures increase, product design, software creation, assembly tooling, test equipment and manufacturing may all occur in separate locations.  Program Management has never been so critical. Clear and agreed expectations, program milestones and performance requirements, and communication format and frequency are essential – as well as what will happen when they aren’t met.  Companies are responsible not just for Quality and durability, but also vigilance to:

–  Social and labor laws,
–  Environmental and recycling requirements,
–  No usage of banned substances, or counterfeit parts or materials, and
–  No infringement of intellectual property.

Any violation will be costly – in both damaged reputation and financial penalties.

The world is moving fast.  If you are left behind, it gets harder to catch up, is more costly to produce and leads to eventual loss of market as your competitors run faster.  If you aren’t where you want to be today … give us a call … we’ll get you back on the road.

Sin #1: Process improvement is not tied to the Strategic issues the business faces.

Sin #2: The process improvement effort does not involve the right people, especially top management.

Sin #3: Process improvement teams are not given a clear & appropriate charter, and are not held accountable for fulfilling that charter.

Sin #4: The top management team thinks if it’s not “nuking” the existing organization (Reengineering),
it’s not making significant improvements.

Sin #5: Process designers don’t sufficiently consider how the changes will affect the people who have to work in the new process.

Sin #6: The organization focuses more on redesign and implementation.

Sin #7: Teams fail to leave behind a measurement system, and other parts of the infrastructure, necessary for continuous process improvement.

Originally published in the HPM Weekly Update, #15, April 12, 2010

For some it is a lands end to John O’ Groats bike marathon, to thers it meand looking at products from manufacture through to reatailer / point of sale.

True “end to end” for manufacturing companies is in my view much more than this. It has the same marathon elements mentioned above and means “getting visibility into supply, manufacture, distribution, retail and consumption”.

This is a  marathon in every way, and where do you start ? IFfyou start conventionally at supply and work through to consumption how can we judge what degree of flexibility is needed in manufacturing or material supply network ? So where do we start ?

Start with the customer! Lets do things correctly and work “right to left ”

With this approach true demand is seen and we can stop guessing. Does inventory profiling work ?and is what we call “supply chain management” just a way of managing warehouses ? When inventory and stock movements are analysed what do we see ? A mass of numbers with everyone using inventory to mask poor forecasting, inflexible operations, ineffective warehouse operations, logistics and retail aisle management.

Mapping right to left and analysing data properly gives us true damand. The output from this can be used to inform the organisation on how much inventory is needed and how an effective supply chain can be built. Moving upstream this informs on flexibility required in manufacturing together with how incoming material must be managed. Visibility an Pull are what is required, do you have them ?

I hav erecently done some work with a food manufacturer with hunderds of different products distributed to thousands of retail outlets. The picture was confused and chaotic  – until the process was mapped right to left and data through the supply chain was analysed. Then came the surprise ! The data does inform us on how many stock pockets are needed and where they should be, it also informs how frequently each product needs to be manufactured and in what quantities.

This gives us a true “end to end view” and align manufacturing to distribution and retail. Is it simpel ? No but it is possible and I recommend you take a look – now. The improvemnt possibilities are considerable, decreased stock, increased flexibility and customer satisfaction and of course profit !

Factors like market saturation, ageing and static populations, threat of low cost competition from emerging economies etc. are not completely new and their march has continued for the past several years. However, the crisis has brutally demolished any hopes of a gradual change and time to adjust to the new landscape.

Consumer and Govt spending is likely to remain under pressure for the foreseeable future and therefore demand for better value will be widespread and remain intense.

This situation can easily be seen to be mainly negative /threatening, but while undoubtedly painful for many consumers /businesses, it also presents opportunities for the innovative and the courageous. In Schumpeter’s words, today we see the perfect time for creative destruction / reconstruction in several industries.

In this series of short blogs, I will share some generic and a few industry specific thoughts on opportunities for creating profitable disruptive change.

There are many strong indicators pointing to an inconvenient truth – in many developed economies, waste or overconsumption in food and drink sectors is widespread. However, few established players, brand owners or retailers, seem to be willing to face up to the implications of dramatic reduction in volumes.

1. Between 30-50% of fresh / chilled food gets wasted in the UK. There are several factors, but a key one is offers like Buy One Get One Free.

2. The steadily increasing % of population that is overweight / obese in Europe and US.

3. An estimate from the recent Parliamentary committee report showed that the total alcohol sales in UK are 40% higher than the volume that can be consumed if all adults consumed the maximum weekly guideline quantities every week. This is not unique to UK and applies to several EU countries though the % varies.

4. Bottled water sales in W Europe have declined dramatically as consumers become aware of environmental consequences of packaging and transport involved in the sector (especially when compared to tap water).

So some of these sectors could see a significant portion of demand disappear for ever driven by stricter regulatory controls on promotions or shift in consumer attitudes. These challenges are as relevant for brand owners as they are for retailers.

I firmly believe that the implications are wide ranging, and product, pricing, promotions, supply chain all will be affected. Environmental and socio-economic implications of such waste / overconsumption are significant and the impact is not confined to corporate P&Ls.

The responses so far from both brand owners and retailers have largely been tentative. Brand owners have streamlined brand portfolios, e.g. Unilever selling many tail brands. Retailers have used Category Management to rationalise SKUs / offer more manageable choice on shelf.

But don’t you think the real opportunity lies in thinking more radically, e.g. ways of redesigning the entire value chain consumer back to fit in with the context today / in future rather than just tinkering with the models that evolved mainly during the 60s/70s/80s?

I believe it is possible to create a much better solution by applying fundamental principles of Lean thinking in combination with new technology and collaboarative networks of the key participants – consumers, retailers, brand owners and their suppliers.

Quite possibly, the spoils / benefits won’t be shared in the same way in the new system as they are today and therefore this requires the courage to free oneself from the vested interests and orthodoxy that naturally build up in industries and organisations.

Fortunately, responsible marketing is beginning to gather momentum. Different brands and businesses are correctly identifying aspects of responsibility most relevant to them and trying to do the right thing, e.g. Coke with water conservation, Unilever with Palm Oil, WalMart with carbon emissions etc.

What could we achieve if the envelope could be pushed much further to tackle the deep rooted challenges head on?

I recently heard a story from friend of mine who is the MD of a small company employing around 50 staff. He told me how he had to intervene when two of his team deemed it acceptable to have a stand up row in front of other colleagues and within earshot of customers. Each had ‘reasons’ as to why they had reacted to the other in the way they had and why things had got out of control- none of them, in my view, acceptable reasons for ‘grown ups’ to behave in this way in the workplace.

In many organisations, people are aware of the technical and professional standards that apply to their roles- teachers know the standards for teaching, lawyers know the law inside out and backwards; even estate agents and financial advisers (sorry) have a code of conduct and standards of operation that they need to adhere to – but these same ‘professionals’ don’t always demonstrate the same rigorous standards when it comes to attitude and behaviour – simply because we tolerate poor behaviour. And tolerating it in one person gives permission to everyone else to do the same.

The statement ‘you get what you tolerate’ is incredibly powerful. In her book entitled ’Fierce Conversations’, Susan Scott (Piatkus, 2002)* says, ‘As a leader, you get what you tolerate. People do not repeat behaviour unless it is rewarded… Have you communicated clearly not only the results but also the behaviour you want? What about the attitude?’ And, to what extent are you prepared to hold people accountable and take action if they do not exhibit the behaviours and attitude you expect? Herb Kelleher, Chairman of the Board of Southwest Airlines said ‘ we are prepared, including legally, to fire you for a bad attitude’. This view is captured by Jim Collins in ‘Good to Great’ (Random House 2001) where he talks about the need for rigorous cultures in organisations. This, for him, is one of the things that differentiates great organisations from good ones. Being rigorous ‘means consistently applying exacting standards at all times and at all levels, especially in upper management.’ He quotes a Wells Fargo executive as saying, ‘the only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.’

Yet organisations are frequently less than rigorous when it comes to standards of attitude and behaviour in their people and are terrified of ‘encouraging’ people to look hard at their job and career choice for fear of being accused of constructive dismissal and bullying – so they get what they tolerate and get the results they get. However, if having and applying rigorous and exacting standards is one of the defining characteristics of great vs good (let alone average) organisations, what reason could there be for continuing to get what you tolerate instead of applying a rigorous approach to all standards and seeing the impact on your business results when you do?

As the ever present headaches of…
- trying to balance focus on maximising profit and margin v investing for growth
- implementing short term high impact initiatives v long term strategic thinking and planning
- focusing on a business as a whole (“corporate think” and control) or on its constituent parts (functional, geographical, product/service streams)
…cause CEOs and their senior executives to consistently strive for the next big thing or the next big idea, all too often the obvious is overlooked.

What is so obvious? Leveraging the talent already within their organisations.

As options such as outsourcing have become commonplace as a means to cost cutting and handing over “non-core” activities to other specialists, the core value of what is left, people, processes and resources, is not always improved or optimised for future benefit.

When organisations downsize, restructure or reorganise again the main focus is often cost cutting and again this leaves fewer people and/or the “wrong” people to create for, deliver for and service customers.

With fewer of the “right” people, (right being of the right cultural fit, appropriately skilled and with the right “organisational DNA” to fit an organisation’s stated mission and deliver its objectives successfully) there may be a need to lead people through a transition programme to make clear what the future now looks like and/or to recruit more people to complement existing capability and acquire new capability.

Key to making the organisational choices work will be the behaviour and attitude of the people who choose to play their part. The cultural mindset – an organisation’s core values and principles – needs to be defined and recruited for; it cannot be trained and as fitting in with an organisational culture or not causes so many problems it is almost more important than skill – which can be trained.

This is an opportunity to create a culture where an “entrepreneurial spirit” is a core value. This is an opportunity to create a culture of “intrapreneurship”.

Should this be a chosen course of action there are 3 key elements to consider

1. What are the core attributes of intrapreneurs?
2. What kind of environment will enable intrapreneurs to flourish and create value?
3. How can individuals develop and be recognised as an intrapreneur?

In part 2 I will address these questions.

What a load of tosh.

The solution from one is that government pumps more cash into traditional construction to save existing jobs and presumably maintain the status quo.

Let’s go for a 1980’s Soviet economy shall we?

I have often been criticised by some in construction for drawing analogies with other industries when ‘construction is different’. I agree there are differences, but construction is not such a special case that market economics no-longer apply.

I can’t think of any product or service (not constrained by scarcity of resource or brand restricted supply) which has shown such a resolute determination not to offer better value for money than housing.

Our ‘real terms’ buying power for food, clothing, electronics, consumer goods and cars has grown so much that for many, all but a car, can be bought out of ‘petty cash’. At the same time the range of price points we are willing to pay has grown:

* Sainsbury basics – Tesco finest – Artisan producers

* Primark – Calvin Klein – Stella McCartney

* SanDisk – Apple – Bang&Olufsen

* Tata Nano – VW Golf – Bugatti Veyron

There is a real need and market for the ‘value’ ranges, but in housing the lowest common denominator dominates the offering. Only the elite get a chance to build their Grand Designs, and the rest of us in the mid-market are left to hark back to yesteryear with older properties.

We need to be more demanding of the sector: I want a ‘huf haus’ (http://www.designer-homes.co.uk/huf-haus) style, to zero carbon standard for £60k + land cost.

huf-haus

‘Can’t be done’ the industry cries ‘If you want more you pay more’ and with that logic we’d still be driving around in Morris Oxfords because all the innovations of the last 50 years would have been cost prohibitive.

Total Flow have spent 2 years learning about the world of construction and housebuilding. We know there is a reluctance to be a true innovator in the industry because it’s the second mouse to the trap that gets the cheese.

Even so, when housebuilding is on its knees, you’d think there would be at least one Maverick looking to break away from the pack and put together a design-supply-build-market model which could make them construction’s equivalent of Dyson or Google.

If you know who the housebuilding mavericks are; do introduce us. We’d like to buy them a coffee, sit down and plan their future domination of the market.