The Background

The regeneration of Birmingham New Street station and the overhead shopping centre, was commissioned to facilitate the doubling number of passengers and to create a contemporary transport and retail hub.

BBI Services were engaged by Network Rail to provide improvement expertise across the project on multiple critical paths and levels.

The Challenge

4 years into the project in 2014, Network Rail recognised the need to reduce the atrium demolition programme by 50% from the original 12 month time scale to 6 months, to ensure on time completion in 2015.

At the same time, the station had to remain open for the 150,000 daily commuters. The work had to be completed in a logistically constrained inner city location, without breaking any upper noise limits.

The Solution

Throughout the ten months leading up to the demolition phase, we facilitated teams in the deployment of a number of tools and key lean techniques.

This ensured a standard visual approach to managing each of the critical paths, as well as the compression of the demolition programme.

These included:

• Setting up control rooms, BIM Visualisation and setting a pacemaker process.

o Ensuring the stakeholders could understand and contribute to the planning and management of the programmes.

• Conducting collaborative planning, waste analysis and problem solving activities, work studies and rapid improvement workshops, in order to make improvements across the board.

o Create a revised atrium demolition programme with stringent working constraints.

• Using set up improvement methodology to reduce a dispersal tunnel from 4 weeks to 48 hours.

o Allowed the critical path to proceed as planned, as well as minimising cost and passenger disruption.

• 4D modelling to detail the revised programmes, sequences and operating models.

o Simplification and standardisation of all the processes were key to reducing the time planned but also the level of risk to the programme.