Research findings from BSRIA show that the building services contracting sector suffers from low productivity and delays. The delays translate to 15% of construction costs.

The findings were revealed by Glenn Hawkins, head of project improvement at BSRIA, at the recent ECA/HVCA Building Services Summit.

Hawkins said that 35% of available time on site was lost to delays, with 16% of the day lost to low productivity. Despite technological advances in the last ten years, this was only marginally better than in 1997 where 40% of time was lost due to delays and 25% of the working day was lost to poor productivity.

“We have a major productive time problem,” said Hawkins. “One-third of a typical day is consumed by delays. The challenge is to build more consistently, at a highly productive level.”

Hawkins said that while there was room for improvement in all areas: organisational, behavioural and technical, the big challenge was in the first two areas. “If we don’t address these then, despite the technical improvements, we’re never going to drive forward performance improvements in a sustainable manner.”

Source

Building Sustainable Design