Beyond Egan and Latham

Construction has moved on a long way in twenty years when contractual arrangements and the tactical nature of supply chains meant that Construction performance was well behind other industries in terms of delivery to time and budget, quality levels and the well-being of workers on sites. But there is still significant room to improve, so where does the industry go next? First, let us remind ourselves of the findings of the Latham and Egan reports. Latham Report The Latham Report of July 1994 was sponsored by Government and Industry following several poorly performing projects. The inefficiencies identified pointed to the need for greater partnering and collaboration in the Construction sector. Egan: Rethinking Construction By 1998, with a fresh change in Government, Sir John Egans Construction Task Force published their report Rethinking Construction commission by ODPM. The main tenets of the report were that the industry needed practical steps to improve productivity and profits, and decrease quality failings and accidents. The report proposed the creation of a movement for change made up of like-minded people from the industry determined to drive change. The challenge now So there has been no shortage of pointers to the way forward. Common themes are better collaboration across the supply chain from concept through build to support. There have been some movements with Integrated Project Teams and ECI, but the issue is more about the maturity of clients to work this way, and the degree of trust within the Supply Chain. Some contractors such as Laing ORourke and Balfour Beatty have acquired elements of their supply chain to get more control. But for many others including Carillion, Willmott Dixon and Taylor Woodrow, the issue is more about working smarter with selected suppliers by trade. There is a move to adopt best practice techniques from other sectors such as Automotive, Aerospace and retail around issues such as Production, Warehousing and Logistics, and even Project Control. The rise of the Project Control function to work alongside the QS is one example of changes in the industry. Technology has also evolved to make collaboration much easier. At the time of the Latham Report, the world was just starting to wake up to the Internet, now wireless web-based collaboration is a reality on many construction sites. The industry is waking up to the use of technology to share information across virtual teams, but here too, the level of collaboration is rudimentary. We need to get to the point where lessons learned are quickly disseminated to projects doing similar work, anywhere around the globe. There have been improvements in delivery quality, reductions in accidents, and even maturing discussions around Sustainability of new structures, but the central issue is still the same, how to turn the Construction industry into a higher trust economy. Without that, supply chain is still the largest area of risk for Contractors.