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Construction transformed? Four years of innovation and £420m of private and public investment: has the Transforming Construction Challenge transformed construction? Justin Stanton talks to some of those involved
onstruction: a more efficient and greener future. This is the journey of the Transforming Construction Challenge, the public-private initiative founded in the summer of 2018. Its four-year mission: to accelerate the shift in construction towards manufacturing and digital processes and a value outcome approach; to achieve what no industry change initiative has achieved before! Run under the auspices of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the challenge saw £170m invested from the public purse, matched by £250m from the construction industry itself.
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The investments were based on three central challenges: moving to a manufacturing approach; embracing digital technologies; and shifting focus to maximising whole-life value of assets. The targets were: l projects delivered 50% faster; l whole-life costs reduced by 33%; l lifetime emissions slashed by half; and l productivity raised by 15%. As part of the challenge, more than 200 organisations – clients, contractors, specialists, manufacturers, start-ups and academia – worked on nearly 50 distinct construction projects.
As part of the challenge more than 200 organisations worked on nearly 50 construction projects
Among those projects were the likes of: Landsec’s Forge office development in Southwark, south London, built using a platform design for manufacture and assembly (PDfMA) system (CM March 2020), and the Laing O’Rourke-led team’s use of augmented reality and virtual reality to drive improvements in quality assurance on the Hinkley Point C project (CM May 2021). The challenge also enabled the publication of the Construction Playbook and the Transforming Infrastructure Performance (TIP) Roadmap to 2030 – the latter included the refreshing of the
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