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