In the UK there’s Level 2 BIM.
The journey began with the original work with the MOJ, but carried on through to the Autumn Statement, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority beginning to talk about Platforms, and the creation of the Construction Innovation Hub itself.. It’s useful to reflect on how far we’ve come in terms of the significant policy changes and the fact that government departments, who have long been delivering massive infrastructure projects in diverse ways, are now starting to realise the benefits of alignment, harmonisation and rationalisation.All of this helps to leverage the change going forwards, and also creates a hopeful background around the possibility that we’ll start to make changes quite quickly.
We saw a similar process with BIM.Once the government established the BIM requirement, there was propagation to the private sector..Defining the Need.
As a result of the Infrastructure Projects Authority and the National Infrastructure Pipeline, we now have more clarity surrounding the issue of what needs to be delivered, for who, and the timescales.Although that’s been available for some time, the conversations around commonality are a significant shift.
The Construction Innovation Hub’s work last year with the Defining the Need Report looked at the specific pipelines of infrastructure delivery (particularly social infrastructure), and analyzed what specification requirements were already in place, their maturity, and how much common ground existed..
The level of significant overlap was surprising.The cost of any prefabricated component (indeed, any component of any building) can be divided into materials and labour.
If we ignore the cost of the labour that has gone into making the component, we only have material costs left, resulting in limited opportunities to add value.Manufacturers have understood this for decades and spent a great deal of effort developing highly productive assembly routines that enabled the mass production, automation and commoditisation that fuelled the consumer age.. Too often factories are treated as ‘construction sites in a shed' producing bespoke, custom components with overlapping trades and poor works sequencing, causing reduced value and the same inefficiencies that are often found on construction sites.
We want the factories that produce components for the construction industry to be more like the best factories making consumer goods; highly efficient, controlled and focused on achieving the highest throughput for the lowest cost, without compromising on quality..In short, we want factories to be less like construction sites.. Construction Platforms: our MMC approach to achieving the best mix of on-site and off-site construction.