Seize the moment

At a Sustainability Live conference panel, Costain said water companies could save a lot of money by manufacturing off-site in a ‘virtual factory’, as leading edge construction projects already do.

Thirty-three per cent less cost, 50 per cent faster delivery, 50 per cent more sustainable and 50 per cent more exportable. There is no client in the land I know – public or private – who wouldn’t want all those things.” It was hard to disagree with Richard Ogden, director of Build Offsite, when he laid out these benefits of off-site manufacture at a panel session hosted by Utility Week in association with Costain at the Sustainability Live exhibition in Birmingham earlier this month.
 
Ogden joined Costain directors Matthew Crabtree, Steve Fozzard and Colin Reynell in a session  at the Sustainability Live exhibition chaired by Utility Week editor Ellen Bennett. The panel laid out the philosophy of “factory thinking” – a new approach to water assets, which they believe will deliver the efficiencies required by the tough new regime being implement for the next asset management plan period (AMP6) as well as speed up delivery and improve quality and safety. It sounds like a no-brainer, but as the panel discussed, the construction industry can be slow to change – and with AMP6 about to begin, time is of the essence.  
 
First up, the panel was keen to tackle preconceptions about offsite manufacture. Ogden said: “A lot of people think that offsite is about toilet pods on the back of a lorry. But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the cheesegrater on Leadenhall Street. That’s being manufactured off Junction 31 on the M1 and delivered in 70 and 80 tonne loads every evening. Some people can’t get their heads around that – they think it’s not possible.”
 
“Off-site manufacture is a series of components that fit together with ‘right first time’ quality – manufactured components, not craft-made on site. That can go to a total building, or a hybrid, and includes everything, from the base of the foundation right up to where the roof touches the sky. You wouldn’t build a car in a field so why build a building in one?”
 
Reynell talked about his experience working for a major car manufacturer, where factory thinking and “productisation” is standard. “A lot of what we do in the water sector is what I’d call ‘tidying the shed’. The real advantage here is to see how we can productise our thinking, then we can decide how to do the manufacturing, in a factory or simply on site.”
 
The panel emphasised the improved quality that can be achieved with off-site manufacture. Steve Fozzard remarked how “defects” is an accepted term in the construction of water assets. He challenged this mentality, saying: “Your clients and your customers should not be your quality control department. We find off-site manufacture gives us the ability to plug and play – test a solution and deliver it and repeat it many, many times. Once you can do that, there are no surprises for your client. Once you turn that on, it works as intended.”
 
Fozzard added that water companies also talk about “asset standards” – and challenged them to turn this around, and talk about “standard assets”. “That’s more positive. It means the client has got a product they can identify as suitable for a certain application, and then get real smart at delivering it much quicker.”
 
In an ideal world, said Fozzard, water companies could even co-operate to develop shared standard assets, which would enable them to cut manufacturing costs and time exponentially. “There are a limited number of assets they want building, so why should every one be different? It simply doesn’t make sense.”
 
Given the many benefits of off-site manufacturing, the obvious question is, why isn’t it being adopted more in the water sector? Ogden highlighted how slow the construction industry can be to change, noting anecdotally that he had recently seen a 5,000-year-old house that was still recognisably a house today. He compared this to the pace of change in the automotive and aeronautic industries. “We’re mentally stuck with the wheelbarrow. It is culture and behaviour: ‘we don’t do it like that round here, son’. It’s that sort of mentality that prevails – and it’s not just a UK problem, it’s a global problem.”
 
This can lead to great inefficiencies within the system. Matthew Crabtree talked about how one water company had 472 different light fittings across its asset base. “Surely to goodness the operation of assets must become more efficient,” he said.  
 
Off-site manufacture requires contractors to work with their supply chains in new ways. Fozzard said: “We will be selecting partners – that gives us the opportunity of having a virtual factory, with the best elements of design and civil specialisms. We plug those together and become an integrator of those solutions.”  
 
For the water industry, the rest of this year presents a window of opportunity. Colin Reynell said: “This is a tipping point: you can influence the next five years in the next nine months. Once you’ve got that smart productisation, you then industrialise it. You have the heartbeat of a factory. You can’t do that mid-AMP.”
 
Ogden reminded the audience of the scale of AMP6 – £25 billion over five years. “That’s a huge number, and who’s going to be paying for it? We are. There has to be a better way. Somebody somewhere is designing another set of toilets. Why? Surely we’ve designed all the toilets we need.”
 
Fozzard sounded a note of cautious optimism. He suggested that AMP6 was encouraging more radical thinking among water companies. “The signs are there. Clients are wrestling with the issue of whole-life
life cost.”
 
As Reynell said, they have little choice, given the savings Ofwat is seeking in AMP6. “You can’t do what you did yesterday and get that level of efficiency.” To borrow Ogden’s closing phrase: “We need to seize this moment.”
 
See: www.sustainabilitylive.com