What an opportunity to, once and for all, deal with the procurement issues in the construction and building industry

Comment by Roy Wakeman OBE,  CEO of Performance Timber Products Group, Immediate BWF Past President and current BWF Board Member.

In last week’s budget the Government released the long awaited Construction Strategy paper along with the delivery plan for the UK’s national infrastructure.
 In response, many will ask: “How many such papers have I witnessed in my lifetime in this industry?” I share the view with many that whilst they were all relevant at the time most have been forgotten, and the various initiatives have either been lost or viewed as irrelevant.”

So let’s consider what was important about this new paper. In my opinion very little really except to say that we now have the technical tools to help deliver the products in a way that will be efficient and, if adopted by manufacturers and distributors, reduce construction costs together with improved completion times and, most importantly, destroy the disease of confrontation and adversarial approach to contract negotiation.

The paper explains how the Government, as a major client, will embed the digital technologies, such as BIM, in their procurement process. They will also affect new procurement methods which support greater collaboration, greater skills capacity and fair payment. But also, and most importantly, to drive whole life cost analysis and the effect the process or product has on the carbon reduction targets.

What we have witnessed before simply didn’t work, and collectively we all knew it wouldn’t, so as manufacturers and for those who design and specify our products little or no attention to the fine detail was paid.

Getting the detail from the client through the various stages of the supply chain is still problematic and constantly holds up design and production, ultimately driving lateness and the resulting balancing of the final costs through the claims courts.

Just think that if at the start of the process the BIM model has been adopted without question, and there is choice through many BIM ….Read the full article here