Featured Project:
CONSTRUCTION

A catalogue of onsite issues and problems had resulted in major delays for a leading construction services business employed on an exclusive high-end development. The old adage time is money, was ringing in the ears’ of the senior management as the overall project cost of the development, consisting of 165 luxury houses and apartments had risen by 15% resulting in significant bottom line loss. Originally a £36M development, ongoing delays and subsequent mounting debts had forced the project team to compensate and reforecast the project to £41M.

It was clear the project was spiralling out of control and the team were operating in crisis mode. Quality control was problematic. Section programmes had slipped between three and six months.

The previous three sections of the project had been handed to the client late along with a high level of snags.

Suiko hit the ground running with a rapid solutions based approach to turn the business critical situation around. The initial aim was to stop the slippage, regain momentum and then concentrate hard efforts on accelerating the programme.

Suiko took swift action and gained excellent short term control of the immediate situation, implementing daily and weekly section and site reviews.

The size and scale of the project was broken down into smaller manageable areas. This allowed managers to gain control of their specific area and engendered a culture of empowerment.

Suiko developed key measures and implemented a programme of lean visual management and a central information centre to ensure all timelines, deadlines and ongoing day to day protocol was visible for reference, review and assessment at all times.

Section leaders were coached to learn how to effectively manage the sub-contractors. Simple ‘Go-See’ problem solving was introduced to encourage and instil improved accountability throughout the team.

Weekly collaborative meetings were rolled out by section, backed by weekly targeting programme improvements. Action teams were then created to tackle the outputs and identify ongoing areas to improve.

As a result Suiko developed a highly proactive management and supply chain.

Phase One

The initial engagement involved an intensive 16 week programme to embed the process

Phase Two

This was followed by the strategic development of focussed action teams

Phase Three

The final phase concentrated on coaching to reduce support and engender sustainable working practices onsite and throughout the supply chain

The end result delivered considerable successes and savings to the client. Not only had activity onsite increased by 50%, large-scale improvements were also achieved in quality control and health and safety. Notably, the total programme completion was delivered 26 weeks ahead of the client’s original schedule.

• Health and Safety reported significant improvements in their audit scores. The development ranked top of the table as the best performing site in the region

• Improved quality control delivered a 700% reduction of snags at the point of handover to the client (140 snags reduced down to 20).

Additional highlights include:

• The multi-disciplined apartment roof action team delivered a 30% reduction in build time which equated to a reduction of preliminary costs of £400k
• The team were able to reduce the roof programme from 23 weeks to 16 weeks resulting in 7 weeks saving
• The building was made dry in 8 weeks as opposed to the scheduled 19 weeks, enabling internal trades earlier onsite access