OFFSITE ROUNDTABLE
COLLABORATION IS KEY
With a focus on understanding customer and supplier needs across the offsite manufacturing ‘eco-system’, a roundtable hosted by ITW Construction Products Offsite, teased out some key industry themes to understand how the offsite supply chain can improve.
Any process developing unique systems and products should start with understanding its customers – what they do, how they operate and listen to where the bottlenecks and frustrations are in their specific operations. With the offsite industry changing and growing quickly, businesses working and collaborating together will evolve faster and be better placed to meet industry challenges and enjoy sustainable and organic growth. As the offsite construction industry moves from a project to a more production-based approach – how can that business model be transformed to capture greater value and what important factors need to be understood when developing and delivering product innovation within the offsite sector? Unlike a traditional construction site where products can be lost or damaged, items entering a factory facility can be easily tracked, with stock levels and locations carefully managed with cutting edge technology. This enables a business to know at the ‘press of a button’ where a particular component or product is at all times. “Purchasing for manufacturing is quite different to purchasing for a traditional
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site,” says Paul Bilbie, Factory Director, Countryside Properties. “We need justin-time deliveries and more control of the materials. We need things as and when we require them. It is important to have relationships with suppliers with agreements in place and for them to be able to understand what we are doing now but also in the future.” The factory environment has long been seen as a perfect location for prototyping and testing products – even down to creating a completed house within the factory. This delivers a greater degree of product and supplier confidence, and enables an organisation’s design and maintenance teams to understand exactly what they are going to be making, and how it will eventually be delivered and put together onsite. This is also where mistakes can be made on a smaller scale and design processes can be changed to respond to new regulations. A key benefit from a manufacturing environment is continuous improvement and the speed of feedback from the shop floor to the design team and from the building site back to design. “The ability to continuously improve is what sets
offsite construction apart from the traditional route,” says Nigel Banks, Special Projects Director, Ilke Homes. “Also, everyone operating in the industry is at a different stage of the journey and has different needs. What concerns us now will have changed in 12 months, or conversely a solution that we don’t need now, we may need in 12 months’ time.” Changes in regulatory environment requirements post-Grenfell is driving many changes in product safety with additional focus on fire testing in particular. But across the built environment, the severe lack of accredited test facilities is often picked out as a major hindrance to introducing innovative products into the marketplace. “One of the issues that our industry has is the lack of accredited testing facilities both in the UK and Europe to do the tests with long timescales to get approval and certification,” says Scott McAndrew, R&D Manager, ITW Construction Products Offsite. To a certain degree, there is also still a lack of maturity in buying decisions – although there is a sense that offsite systems and products are the ‘right solution for projects, there is not a lot of certainty of performance’,
WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021
