Early engagement with industry will heighten offsite manufacturing benefits

Clients who want to maximise the advantages of offsite manufacture need to engage as early as possible in the process or see benefits curtailed by design and planning issues, a major modular construction firm has said.

McAvoy Group’s Senior Business Development Manager Graham O’Doherty told delegates at our Offsite Manufacture Development Conference that engaging with his firm as early as possible would reap best results: “A house can be anything you want it to be or planners want it to be as long as you engage early. Don’t come to us at RIBA stage 3 and say you have planning permission and would like it to be delivered volumetrically. It’s unlikely to work very well, so you need to engage early at RIBA stage 0.”

Mr O’Doherty noted that both clients, contractors and suppliers needed to rethink how they approach procurement to gain more from the process. He added: “We use organisations like CHIC [Central Housing Investment Consortium] and other buying consortiums who can engage earlier with suppliers. What it takes is a mindset change from suppliers and it doesn’t have to be the adversarial type of procurement that happens today. We very much need to start working in collaboration. [emaillocker id=”71749″]

“It is about having your beauty parade earlier. If you are having a design carried out, and you’d have heard from some excellent designers this morning. If you want to get best value do it at RIBA stage 1, not RIBA stage 3.”

Buying consortiums CHIC was formed to allow members from over 150 housing associations and councils to collectively buy and procure to ensure greater efficiencies and maximise their buying power. The consortium’s members collectively own or manage approximately 700,000 homes.

Managing Director of CHIC said that the affordable housing market needed to think about how to standardise their homes to maximise the benefits of scaling-up build or manufacture: “A lot of [affordable] developers build tens or hundreds rather than thousands of properties and they do it all differently, typically price difference is 15 to 20% more in the affordable sector than the volume sector.

“There is lots of talk about standardisation and approach, it can look different – that’s the sense of place but the underlying components and basics need to be a standard product that’s effective and efficient. In the affordable sector we make everything special and expensive. What we should be providing is to volume and make it [home delivery] efficient.” [/emaillocker]