David Bennett, Business Manager at Topcon, has worked in the construction industry for over 14 years. He has been managing the GB and Ireland business at Topcon since 2013.
ast month, the Government published its highly-anticipated White Paper, ‘Fixing our broken housing market’, setting out its plans to tackle the chronic undersupply of new homes across the UK.
The challenge the White Paper lays out is stark – its authors say that the construction industry needs to increase house-building from the current 160,000 a year to 275,000 for the foreseeable future to ensure demand doesn’t outstrip supply.
To help the industry meet this ambitious target, the White Paper offers a number of proposals to make building easier. These include: a commitment to maximising the use of brownfield land; a pledge to make councils regularly update their housing plans; a promise to tackle unnecessary delays to new projects caused by planning conditions and a plan to explore other ways of working with developers to build the infrastructure to support new housing.
Planning not the only barrier
The initiatives set out in the White Paper have been broadly welcomed by the construction industry. They will certainly help streamline the planning process for new homes, and ensure developments are sited where they are most needed. However, they don’t address the on-site inefficiencies faced by developers that impact on the time, cost and delivery of projects.
Poor communication of data between designers and contractors, for example, makes it harder for changes to building design to be translated into formats that can be understood on site. This can lead to significant knock-on effects on projects, such as mistakes in laying out the foundations. These, in turn, can take time to rectify, slowing down the building process and costing money too.
Unless we tackle such efficiency challenges as an industry now, it will be increasingly difficult to meet the Government’s house-building targets in the future.
Collecting and using data accurately
For more members of the construction industry, advanced technology is key to enhancing building efficiency, and to improving communication between partners across the supply chain.
Machine control is one such example of modern construction equipment having a significant positive impact on project delivery. This technology uses GPS data and 3D models to help contractors dig earthworks more accurately. This information is communicated to a system in the cab via satellite-positioning data, giving an accurate view of the machine’s current position compared to the desired result. In doing so, it can reduce the costs associated with over-excavation and similar errors by up to 20%.
Moreover, machine control can offer efficiency benefits when redeveloping brownfield land, especially on former industrial sites. These often contain patches of ground contaminated with chemicals used in manufacturing processes that have to be cleared before construction can begin. The real-time updates offered by machine control allow this soil remediation to be carried out at the same time as excavation, streamlining the preparation work on the site and even helping to increase the re-use of uncontaminated materials in earthworks.
Brownfield remediation expert, McAuliffe, put this into practice on the site of a former cable factory in Prescot Business Park, Liverpool. Using Topcon’s machine control technology, it was able to combine site remediation and reclamation, leading to significant cost and time savings. This technology also enabled engineers to feed updated design models straight to cab drivers, saving even more time and making it possible to share ‘as-built’ data.
Sharing data efficiently
Poor data sharing practices across the supply chain can also lead to time delays. Often, designs are shared with contractors via PDF documents, which can then take up to four days to set out, as developers need to manipulate the data. Using CAD files instead can significantly streamline this process, reducing the setting out time to just four hours.
Machine control technology can help resolve this data sharing issue, by linking designers working off site with contractors carrying out the construction work. In doing so, changes in the proposed design for a building, or the layout of a new street, can be fed straight to the people driving the excavation equipment, in real-time, minimising the risk of delays or errors.
ECL Civil Engineering is using Topcon’s web-based communications systems – Sitelink3D – to do just that. The system allows its designers to alert machine operatives to any issues with earthworks levels, or any alterations in the layout of the work, so they can rectify the problem quickly and efficiently, without impacting on the timely delivery of the project.
The future for data
The housing crisis currently afflicting the UK has a wide range of underlying causes. In publishing its White Paper, the Government has demonstrated that it is committed to supporting the industry in tackling the planning obstacles to meeting the country’s future housing needs.
However, the industry itself needs to do its bit too, and refining the current approach to data is a definite priority. As technology advances, the levels of data captured and processed by the construction industry are rapidly growing. However, understanding how to handle this data in the most efficient and effective way at each stage of the construction workflow is critical if we are to use it to transform the way we construct for the better. In doing so, we can all ensure we are doing our bit to fix the broken housing market.
