Performance enhancer

We like to reinvent the wheel, while in many parts of Europe and the USA they are prepared to just get on the bike and ride.

Recent studies by the Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA) show that the m&e sector needs to take part of the blame. Figures from BSRIA’s project improvement team show that the building services sector suffers from low productivity and delays. Across a number of projects, 35% of available time on site was lost to delays, with 16% of the day lost to low productivity.

Alarmingly, this is only marginally better than 10 years ago, when BSRIA’s studies indicated that 40% of time was lost to delays and 25% of the time wasted due to poor productivity.

Despite the technological advances that have been made in that time, organisational and behavioural factors continue to hold the industry back.

This month’s On-site piece shows that there is another way (pages 21-25). N G Bailey’s m&e work on St Helens and Whiston hospitals sees thousands of prefabricated modules flying out of Bailey’s Bradford factory to site. In all, 70% of engineering services are pre-tested in the factory, there are 40% less m&e workers on the Whiston site than are usually found on a traditional build and N G Bailey’s accident incident rate was improved by more than 30%.

Off-site construction is of course nothing new. Yet, even at Whiston, the design team needed a fair amount of convincing before going down this route. The successes of this project, and others like it, need to be much more widely disseminated if the m&e team are to be allowed to bring their ideas to the table.