Cliff Smith, executive director of the Get It Right Initiative (GIRI), tells PBC Today about the benefits of reducing error at the design phase – not just in delivery – and how it can provide construction firms with a competitive advantage
The latest S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index shows that doing business in construction remains a real challenge. There have been more sharp declines in output and new orders in June, interest rates are still high and there is fresh political uncertainty with a new prime minister taking the helm.
In such a tough business environment, construction firms must do everything they can to protect their margins, which are already slim.
A good place to start is to look at the money that the industry is actively wasting – and take steps to stem the flow. In a recent GIRI training pilot across 25 UK projects, four tier-one construction firms were given the task of actively looking out for the risk of error across the lifecycle of construction. By doing so, they found – and avoided – £92.6m in rework costs.
What might come as a surprise is how much of this remedial work could have been avoided before construction even began. Of the £92.6m, £85.5m of this was related to design. In fact, design is a factor in five of the 10 most common root causes of error.
Clearly, more needs to be done to change minds in the industry: cutting the rework that comes from avoidable error doesn’t just happen onsite. It starts in the earliest stages of a project.
Embedding best practice at the point that it matters
How can this be done in practice? A good starting point is to be more disciplined about decision-making. The design brief should be treated as a control document, with major
changes formally recorded and signed off.
Design reviews must actively challenge assumptions instead of simply reporting progress, and enough time should be allowed to test options before teams commit to a preferred solution. GIRI’s Design Guide also recommends making change control a standing agenda item throughout the process.
These may sound like small interventions, but they help tackle the late changes and miscommunication that are responsible for so much avoidable rework.
Design error is everyone’s responsibility
Some of this lack of understanding boils down to accountability. Although error can originate in design, that doesn’t mean these problems are solely the responsibility of architects and design teams.
Research from the Centre for Construction Best Practice shows that the closer to RIBA Stage 0 that contractors are appointed, the lower the average cost overrun is for the client. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The design process involves identifying and exploring different options and solutions, but having contractors in the room is the
best route to avoid buildability issues later down the line. Mistakes also happen when projects move from design to build and communication is poor. Staying more joined up
between teams can lower the chances of critical details slipping through the cracks.
To drive this sense of shared responsibility, we need as many people in the industry as possible to understand the challenge – and what they can do to address it.
That’s why we chose to make our new Design Guide e-learning course free to use and available online. By making the advice from our longstanding training courses accessible and interactive, we hope that we can show a wider portion of the industry the role they can play in eradicating design-related errors.
The digital opportunity
Training can also be supported by new tools, providing they are adopted in the right way. GIRI’s most recent technology report highlighted an example of this.
Galliford Try Infrastructure was faced with a challenge to confirm the dimensional accuracy of prefabricated steel bridge beams before installation on the Melton Mowbray Distributor Road project. Using high-precision laser scanning and AI-assisted reality capture, it was able to compare the scanned data against the 3D design model and visualise potential clashes – these were then identified and corrected, avoiding the need for rework.
Our call to the industry is clear: reducing design error is not a job for designers alone. It depends on more collaboration on briefs, better communication and having the confidence to flag mistakes before they become a problem.
In a market where margins are under pressure, error reduction should be seen as a competitive advantage – and that attitude must start right from the drawing board.
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