Research suggests that the UK construction industry’s annual spend due to error is a staggering 7 times more than its annual profit. Contributing towards this are challenges such as design readiness, procurement (delivery of materials), planning/sequencing errors, minimal training, and limited communication.
Below we discuss 4 ways of minimising wasted resources and ensuring you get it Right First Time.
1. Establish a performance culture
Before undertaking any construction project, it’s vital that there’s a clear sense of value and intent across your organisation. Establish clear objectives and a brief that any member of the team and workforce can refer back to at any stage.
At BBI, as part of our strategy deployment, we help businesses define what great looks like and implement this throughout organisations. Furthermore, developing a collaborative workplace culture encourages teams to identify opportunities in current operations, and capitalise on them.
Investing in the coaching and upskilling of your team, helps to identify areas where errors are frequent, and profits are lost.
2. Improve your manufacturing systems
Process optimisation is also a key contributor towards increasing productivity. As we all know, productivity in the construction industry has only risen by 12% in the last 20 years (to 2020). Meanwhile, the overall economy has seen a 53% rise in productivity. A huge contributor to this statistic is the ‘wasted’ time and effort, often spent rectifying errors. Streamlining your processes from the start will help to reduce error, maximise productivity, and increase your profitability.
A lot of error in construction is caused by insufficient systems. When implementing highly efficient, proven manufacturing systems, our team helps you to establish an end-to-end process plan that considers both the short and long-term future state.
We assist you in deploying a collaborative planning approach to determine your milestones for each day, week and month. This will help instil a performance management framework for you to measure your success at every stage and identify potential areas of error before they arise.
Furthermore, by applying the Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approach, you can error-proof existing methods, and significantly increase the quality of the build. By optimising your manufacturing systems, you can reduce errors, streamline your schedule, and increase profits at every stage.
3. Collaborate across the supply chain
Collaborating and learning from others are key skills in the UK’s current construction climate. We work with supply chain partners and clients to identify areas of opportunity which includes how we communicate across the entire supply chain and areas where it can be further optimised. Can handovers be more efficient? Are there any regular, unnecessary costs that we can eliminate?
Analysing and monitoring your supply chain will help to focus on building strong and collaborative relationships to help reduce the risk of error at any point within the chain.
4. Know when to stop
The construction industry is governed by deadlines and tight turnarounds. However, countless businesses make the mistake of prioritising speed over quality. If you can see that your processes aren’t working, don’t continue working regardless. This will only result in more wasted materials, time and resources. Furthermore, you’ll have to sacrifice increased costs and risk the safety of your staff to put the situation right. Data shows that 39% of construction workplace injuries happen as a result of rework.
As such, it’s important that you know when to step back and revise the plan. Our team help to identify opportunities for improvement and an innovative strategy that ensures safe and profitable project delivery.
Construction process improvement for the UK construction industry
BBI Services’ team of experts work with you to optimise your processes, improve your output quality, and implement a Right-First-Time mindset across the business.
For more information, please contact our team at info@bbiservices.com