Members who are not active in the nuclear newbuild sector should not be put off by the origin of our latest report Construction Factory Thinking, produced by our Nuclear theme group, nor by its potentially slightly misleading title. Certainly there is some nuclear-specific context in there, but most of the content seems to me to be highly relevant for all parts of our industry. Also, whilst it does talk about offsite prefabrication and ‘design for manufacturing and assembly’ (DfMA) approaches, it is not a report about this approach. Instead it focuses on the role of a Production Engineer on site to address productivity, whether on a project where the design stage has not begun and so offsite and DfMA etc can still very much be part of the delivery model, or on a project which is underway and the opportunity has gone, or is at least severely limited. So, factory thinking is all about managing a site as if it was a factory… Sorry if that was obvious to everyone else, to me it was a lightbulb moment! Which brings lean back to the forefront of our agenda, as has our work in Qatar, where the Public Works Authority asked for our help to set up an initiative to share and learn from best practices and to implement lean construction techniques. They have called it Constructing Excellence in Qatar, which seemed to me a pretty good name for it! If any members or other contacts want to know more, please contact me here and I can provide more information or connect you in.
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