Redefining Architecture: Collaboration, Inclusivity, and Innovation | Satwinder Samra

The DfMA landscape is littered with acronyms, abbreviations and terminology that is often poorly defined and even more poorly understood.

Even way back in 2013, the Government’s ‘Construction 2025’ vision proposed that construction should no longer be characterised by ‘late delivery, cost overruns, commercial friction, late payment’.While this has been partly addressed through legislation such as the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 and the Prompt Payment Code, it is still a problem.. A digital marketplace would help make payments more timely – in some cases even instant.

It would also make the construction procurement process more transparent and give suppliers greater certainty of cash flow.. Thirdly: procurement is another significant cause of ‘friction’ in projects, as noted in Construction 2025.The process of arranging and issuing tender documentation and requests for proposals, scoring them and awarding contracts, is very time-consuming and labour-intensive.Projects very often require a complex network of contracts to ensure that the main contract clauses are passed down through the supply chain, resulting in management overhead on overhead being passed back up to the client.. For these reasons, the Construction Playbook notes that:.

To support the growth and inclusion of more SMEs in the delivery of public works projects, we need greater visibility of the public spending flowing down the supply chain.Suppliers should invest in automated, digital payment and contracting systems and processes.

Digitisation will improve transparency, information exchange, payment performance and contract management across the supply chain.

Standard components and digital tools - the construction Platforms ‘ecosystem’.They can be messy, congested, dirty and chaotic places.

But they don’t have to be.If the construction process can be transformed into the streamlined and predictable assembly of pre-manufactured parts, combined with on-site construction processes that are carefully managed to add the maximum value, much greater productivity can result.. To give a slightly left-field example, consider a circus tent.

Typically, these large structures are put up overnight by a small team of trained operatives.In a budget-conscious industry, every hour counts, so assembly is planned to be as quick as possible, and disassembly is just as quick.