Southbase says there is a renewed appetite for standardised designs.
Southbase says there is a renewed appetite for standardised designs.
Southbase chief operating officer Will Birch says a move to repeatable design could transform construction with huge cost savings and efficiency gains.
He says it’s time to stop taking a wasteful, fragmented approach to design, procurement and building.
“We have recently been through a time where there have been three major issues: affordability, productivity, and the one that doesn’t get talked about so much, but which ties both of the others in — accountability.
“In particular, there has been a lot of government spending without enough accountability. Of course everyone wants to live in a bespoke, award-winning house that was built on a money-is-no-object budget, but that is not a sound basis for Crown infrastructure projects.”
Now there is less money around, things are changing.
Birch says in his work for one of New Zealand’s largest construction firms, he is hearing from big ministries with large property portfolios in areas such as health and education that there is a renewed appetite for standardised designs. “In recent times things were designed traditionally and bespokely.
“The procurement was piecemeal, everything was a one-off. If there was an issue with going over budget, they’d have to go back to the drawing board to start again. It burned up resources and time, and there wasn’t much value in that approach.”
Birch says standardisation doesn’t have to mean dreary, cookie-cutter conformity: “We’re not trying to promote a communist Eastern Bloc design approach. But there are basic principles that don’t need to be redesigned every time: every classroom more or less looks the same when you are inside, and hospital wards share many characteristics with other wards, they don’t always need to be unique.
Southbase’s Innofab prefabrication plant on site at OneNZ Stadium.
“Southbase’s approach is to put a series of standardised elements together, it may mean figuring out how that works on site because there are often site-specific geographical or topographical elements to deal with. Every project can be bespoke in that sense, but if you walk into a classroom, you should know immediately where you are.”
Repeatable design can play a similar role in social housing. Birch says at one point there were almost 360 typologies used by Kāinga Ora.
Despite commercial pressures, things are not that different in the private housing sector.
He says there needs to be a middle ground where we enjoy some diversity in architecture, but where we can also maximise the efficiency of standardisation.
He says: “Let’s use those standardised designs. Let’s reduce the design timeframe because that costs money. Standardisation doesn’t have to mean giving up flexibility.
“We were engaged last year by a client to work with a concept where we discovered the plan was going to cost more than the client had budget. Once we understood what the client’s drivers were, we were able to work with them to increase their yield on the building by increasing the number of rooms we could get into the footprint, which increased their return and meant the whole development stacked up. Using standard components made that work.”
Technology has a key role to play here.
“We need to look at maximising technology like BIM Building Information Modelling because it means we can create digital twins and design projects on a computer before we even get to the site. By doing this over an entire portfolio of work we can be far more efficient. Instead of a piecemeal procurement process, we can run the portfolio through the BIM computer model and it will tell us how much of each material and component we need to buy to build a thousand dwellings, and that’s just for one contract.
“Imagine the gains if you can run that standardised design across an entire portfolio of building projects. At the moment we are missing a massive opportunity when it comes to buying things such as floor coverings, plasterboards or ceilings.
“Remember, you’ll be buying large quantities of each irrespective of what the building looks like from outside. Across an entire portfolio, a business like Southbase would buy floor covering by the kilometre, not by the metre.”
While bulk-buying material means substantial savings from sharper prices, it also means fewer supply chain challenges. Importing larger quantities gives overseas suppliers more incentive to invest in servicing the New Zealand market.
Standardisation means operating at scale and that has huge implications for PPP projects.
Birch says many people view the PPP model as being primarily a finance vehicle for getting projects built without the capital expense, but he says the real benefit is that the government agency, council or other entity gets a long term asset and it gets an organisation there that is willing to take full accountability of designing building and operating an asset or series of assets that stand the test of time.
Full accountability over the years means a move to looking at a whole-of-life cost for projects. When building one-off projects that are immediately handed over to the owners, there’s a tendency for contractors to bid low in order to win projects. That means doing things as cheaply as possible, with little reference to the long-term cost.
Birch says when a PPP is focused on the whole of life, the contractor has a different perspective.
“It might cost you 20% more up front to buy a premium heat pump with a 10-year shelf life, when compared with choosing something that might last only five years, but the more expensive model is going to last twice as long and may be cheaper to operate.
“People tend to look at the initial price of a project as the cost, then think they can build it cheaper than that ourselves, but they are not thinking about the lifetime cost.”
Accountability is often overlooked in the construction sector.
Birch says accountability is an important component in the idea of public private partnerships or PPPs: “They can mean 100% accountability from the private sector because you’ve got the equity guys, the facilities management guys and a design and build contractor.
“Each of them is on funding, designing and building an asset that’s going to stand the test of time.”
● Southbase is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Infrastructure Report.
