You may have heard about the Lang O'Rourke vision that if 70 per cent of construction on a project takes place offsite, it will lead to a huge 60 per cent increase in productivity and a 30 per cent reduction program. Well it's surely exciting for the residential construction industry that they have actually achieved it....
So why don't more of us embrace MMC?
Ray O'Rourke KBE is the Laing O'Rourke founder who specialise in MMC and offsite manufacture of buildings across many of the construciton sectors. Here are some snippets from a recent article published.
"Times of great challenge can lead to great change. As ever-larger parts of our economy reopen and we focus as a nation on a return to economic growth, now is a moment to seize the opportunity for transformational change in how we do things."
As we saw after the GFC, a strong construction industry will again be critical as our economy recovers from both Brexit (If you remember that word) and the Covid-19 Pandemic. Ray pointed out that because of the millions of people (>3M) employed in construction "The Government rightly enabled construction sites to stay open – with appropriate protections in place – throughout the lockdown and is now looking at how to bring new projects forward."
With the damning CAST government commissioned report titled "Modernise or Die", identifying the poor construction productivity improvements over decades, especially when you compare it to other industry productivity figures, surely this was a wake up call.
Laing O'Rourke also suggest that at present, most construction is still done in "a way that the Victorians would recognise – by hand, brick by brick, out on site come rain or shine".
So is MMC the answer to productivity in Construction?
Quite apart from the benefits of productivity MMC (Modern Methods of Construction) offers from a productivity point of view, there are a variety of benefits. we will be exploring some of these at our MMC virtual event shortly to be happening. This will include looking at some of the following
Post Covid efficiency even with social distancing
Reducing cost
Reducing carbon impact
Creating better Quality practises and end to end traceability.
Speeding up project delivery.
Better working conditions and less travel for those make building components.
A natural lead towards better upfront design and collaboration.