Inventors: Professor Campbell Middleton, Dr Danny Murguia & Dr Ashan Asmone, Laing O’Rourke Centre for Construction Engineering & Technology
Research group website: https://www.construction.cam.ac.uk/research-and-innovation/performance-productivity
One of the greatest challenges faced by the construction sector is to measure performance, and reduce the incidence of project delays and cost over-runs. This affects the whole range of construction projects from small domestic work through to multi-million and multi-billion pound projects such as HS2 in the UK, and our own new Cavendish Laboratory. With the UK looking to build 1.5 million homes in the next 5 years, reducing project delays and costs could have a significant impact across the whole country. In the short-term reducing delays will also reduce costs, and in the longer-term will enable the sector to improve its overall sustainability.
Building on over 14 years of research, the team at the Laing O’Rourke Centre is working closely with a range of industrial partners to address this issue from two sides. Firstly, better data collection is needed to understand what is really happening in construction projects. Then this data can be used to assess appropriate benchmarks for different types of projects. As an example, understanding the maximum reasonable production rate of similar projects in a specific area can help improve the initial planning and costing process before construction even starts. Other data can help project designers plan from the start to create buildings that can be delivered more reliably on-time and within-budget.
Initial trials of the team’s software-based approach have involved several major UK construction projects, enabling the identification of inefficiencies, waste and system problems at the interfaces between different activities. The researchers would now like to understand how well their findings and methodology apply to other parts of the construction industry, as well as identifying appropriate market entry strategies that will aid adoption of their tools elsewhere.
The i-Teams project, which will focus on identifying and interviewing experts from across the whole construction sector value chain, will help the team plan the most effective commercial strategy and route-to-market for a future spin-out to adopt, enabling them to maximise the impact of their work.