Simon Murray

We were just getting to grips with the disruption to supply chains that resulted from the pandemic when along came a 50% increase in the price of diesel and a four-fold increase in gas prices.  Businesses that use large amounts of energy are talking of suspending their operations and we haven’t begun to understand the impacts this could have on the supplies of the materials and components we need to build our infrastructure projects.  There is no way that the market will sort these problems out for us.  We have to pool our knowledge and our relationships and use them to understand where there are most likely to be disruptions to our supply chains and what we can do to fix them.  And an enterprise structure is a helpful place to start from.

Hi Ian,  I like your Robert Kaplan quote.  I think it was Lou Gerstner - the CEO who rebuilt IBM in the 1980s - who said "Nobody ever built a great business by cutting costs".  I will reply to your other comments when I have had a chance to think about them.

Ian, many thanks for your comment and I am sorry for the delay in replying.  Unfortunately our website doesn't notify us when somebody has posted a comment.  The BSRIA report does explain the immediate causes of people standing around on construction sites and this analysis has been confirmed by several studies amongst the lean construction community.  The typical cause of people standing around on construction sites is that they are waiting for something they need before they can start work - tools, materials, information or for the previous task to be completed.  And, in my opinion, the root cause is inadequate management of the work by general contractors and their sub-contractors.  To be fair to the general contractors, decades of being asked by their customers to accept large risks has encouraged them to transfer risks to their sub-contractors and discouraged them from getting involved in their sub-contractors' management of the works.  And to be fair to the sub-contractors, the general unpredictability of the construction environment has limited their appetite for investing in modern production management systems.  As a result, about half of the available man-hours worked on construction sites in the UK and the USA are wasted.  

I was fortunate to be invited to visit the A14 project several times during its construction and to spend time with Mark and his team as they developed their digital platform and the culture that supported it.  Thanks to the team's efforts, the A14 project marked a major step forward in the use of common information systems to manage large infrastructure projects.  But, it was just one step forward and, if we are to realise the team's vision of a single source of the truth on our infrastructure projects, we have to solve the problem of creating a common information architecture for these projects around a single production system.  And we have to develop commercial relationships with suppliers that enable them to share their production information without fear of it being used against them. 

Ian,  many thanks for your comment.  I agree that change has a significant impact in reducing productivity, but I suggest that change is just one aspect of the wider problem of instability in our design and construction process.  Back in the 1990s, I was privileged to work for Sir John Egan and he used to tell us that you can't improve a process until it is predictable.  At around that time BSRIA published an excellent report titled Improving M&E Site Productivity - you can still buy a copy on their website.  The report presents a body of data that shows how productivity on site is reduced by people standing around waiting for things - information, materials, tools and for the previous task to be completed.