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?

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.