STANDARDISATION AND PRE-ASSEMBLY

Standardisation and Pre-Assembly to Construction Projects



Standardisation and Pre-Assembly to Construction Projects

Introduction

Coming in the wake of a major recession, the decade 1990-2000 presented an opportunity for a continued commitment by the UK government to modernise the construction industry. The purpose of this commitment was primarily to ensure that UK construction is able to compete with the best in the evolving climate of a globalised market for national economies (McCaffer and Edum-Fotwe, 2000). However, it also addressed the provision of value for money for the industry's clients with regard to their investments in physical developments (TTF, 2000a, b).

Although there have been previous studies on the performance of the construction industry within the UK, such as the Emmerson report in 1962, the efforts to improve the performance of the sector in recent times was instigated by the publication of the Latham report (Latham, 1994) to be followed by the report on rethinking construction (Egan, 1998). These two reports brought into prominence the differential rates of technological and managerial innovation in the delivery of construction infrastructure developments compared to other sectors, especially manufacturing. This has resulted in an innovation agenda within construction, taken up by the initiatives and movements that emanated from the reports. While this slow rate of innovation within construction had relevance to the private developer, it presented an even greater significance for the public organisation (Van de Ven and Rogers, 1988; Pavitt, 1991). This was particularly the case for departments such as Health that have considerable assets in physical developments. At the same time, the expected levels of performance improvement in construction are often demonstrated in the manufacturing sector to be partly attributable to standardisation of components and processes (Griffith et al., 2000; Kondo, 2000). This underscores the relevance of standardisation and its potential for bringing about improvement in development schemes for major clients such as the NHS.

However, the concepts underlying innovation and standardisation presents an apparent divergence in what each strives to achieve in order to attain the performance improvement. The paper presents as a case, one major public sector outfit is making efforts to achieve innovation within an agenda that involves a widespread adoption of standardisation. The paper also discusses the motivations for adopting an organisation-wide agenda on innovation and standardisation within construction. It also identifies the elements of apparent incongruity between innovation and standardisation, and presents how the case organisation has resolved the divergences.

Research Problem

The introduction of standards (standardisation) could assist in achieving consistency for the widespread deployment of innovation. Such consistency necessitates a stable system and structure (as well as procedures and processes). However, a stable and unchanging system could be inimical to adopt and sustain innovation (Kondo, 2000). The essential drivers of innovation and standardisation as mechanisms for performance improvement within organisations therefore present diverging requirements.

Aims & objectives

Aim To critically explore the benefits that using standardisation and pre-assembly can bring to construction projects in terms of Time, Cost and Quality.

Objectives - To main objective of this research paper is ...