Strong month for Infrastructure

The latest statistics in the Economic & Construction Market Review have been released, showing a strong month for construction. In particular, infrastructure works, which reached a high of £1Bn – the first time in six months this threshold has been exceeded.

According to Barbour ABI, the total value of new contracts across construction reached £6Bn in August, a monthly increase of 28.9%. The growing value of contracts through the summer has brought a better outlook to the industry having struggled with conditions (both economic and meteorological) earlier in the year.

Looking more closely at the sectors, residential work continues to dominate workloads and during August contract values registered at £2.2Bn, accounting for more than a third of contracts awarded. However, this is still some way behind the recent peak of March 2018 at £2.4Bn.

Boosted by a number of large utilities contracts, infrastructure led the table of the biggest value contract awards across construction with five of the top ten projects for August being from this sector. The largest, the £1.8Bn Triton Knoll 900MW Offshore Wind Farm in the Greater Wash Basin off the Lincolnshire coast, involves 288 turbines which are scheduled to produce 900 to 1,200 MW of electricity. The award of this project, plus Project Two at the Hornsea Onshore Substation in Lincolnshire, contributed significantly to the East Midlands leading the regional position with 68.4% of contracts awarded within the infrastructure sector.

These awards are a keen indicator of growth in East Midlands currently, led by HS2 investment. Leading in Infrastructure awards, the East Midlands also leads regionally across all sectors too, with a contract award value of 28.8% of the UK total. This was followed by the South East with a 14%, boosted by the second largest contract award project – the M23 J9-J10 Smart Motorway Gatwick Junctions in Redhill in Surrey at £158.4M.

Commenting on the figures, Michael Dall, Lead Economist at Barbour ABI, said: “It’s been a positive month – every sector within construction is up month on month and it is great to see award values boosted by some big-ticket Infrastructure projects. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the better numbers are temporary as the industry continues to play catch up with the lost output from the start of the year, but these figures should still provide much-needed confidence and are hopefully a sign of a more durable upturn in demand.”

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Torcross nominated for ICE award

A sea defence project in Devon has been shortlisted for an international engineering award.

The Environment Agency’s Torcross sea defence repair project is just one of ten projects worldwide nominated for the Institution of Civil Engineers People’s Choice Award 2018. The award recognises top civil engineering projects and the winner is chosen by public vote.

The Environment Agency team based in Devon worked with contractors Bam Nuttall Mott Macdonald Joint Venture (BMM JV) to complete the £2.4M project within 14 months of problems being identified. The work was funded by Defra flood defence grant in aid.

The repairs were required as lowered beach levels caused the sea defence foundations to become exposed, and winter storms of 2015/6 caused further damage to the road, wall and promenade. Constructed in the 1980s, the sea wall defences needed to be repaired in order to maintain protection to adjacent properties.

With a tight deadline – working in to resolve the issues before the seasonal storms begin, the Environment Agency needed to identify the underlying issues with the wall and rectify them. The team faced a variety of challenges including tides encroaching into the working area, constrained access routes and a high risk of unexploded ordnance as Exercise Tiger – a live-fire training exercise for the D-Day landings – took place on the beach.

Environment Agency Project Manager Becky Richards said: “We would love Torcross to win this very prestigious industry award, but the competition is tough and we need votes to help us get to the top.

“I’d like to thank all involved in getting us nominated, especially the local community who were really understanding throughout construction. Working with the tides meant long, noisy shifts. We couldn’t have completed the project so quickly without the support of people in Torcross.”

The winner of this year’s People’s Choice Award will be announced on 6 November 2018.

Anyone can vote – you can read about each of the ten projects and vote on the ICE Website. Voting closes on 28 September 2018.

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Oxfordshire invest in road and building repair

A major £120M infrastructure fund has been approved by Oxfordshire County Council, easing the spending squeeze on road and property repairs.

The Council has agreed to borrow up to £120M which will be invested in highway and council-owned building improvements, following a report on under-investment in the area.

The report acknowledged that under-investment has resulted in significant reduction in quality of major and minor roads, as well as pavements, with an increase in car damage and personal injury claims, and residents regularly calling for improvements. While council-owned buildings, such as schools, also require investment.

The investment proposal means the whole county would be benefit from a ‘growth dividend’. Oxfordshire’s expected growth in homes and council tax income gives scope to borrow to invest that will, over the long term, save money.

The county council has already agreed to spend £10M extra this year on the roads, in response to research by the independent Transport Research Laboratory that shows that maintaining roads generates £5 within the local economy for every £1 invested.

Councillor Yvonne Constance, the council’s cabinet member for Environment said: “Oxfordshire’s expected growth in homes and council tax income gives us the scope to borrow money to invest that will over the long term save us money.

“This growth dividend would mean serious money for serious work. Some of Oxfordshire’s roads have fewer than five years of life left. We are where we because councils have had difficulties due to the well documented combination of rising demand for social care and falling funding levels overall over many years. This is a problem for local government to deal with across the UK

“We have already taken action in response to road conditions and having already agreed in July to spend £10M extra on the roads. This new money will allows us to get ahead of the curve and make a real difference

“We all know that our roads, pavements and bridges need extra investment and this plan seeks to unlock the funding to allow that to happen. This plan gives us a logical and sustainable way out of the current situation – the benefits of which we hope people will begin to see on our roads sooner rather than later.”

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Challenges of e-disclosure in construction cases

As the use of technology has changed the way we communicate, and the volume of documents created every day has drastically increased.

It is estimated that 156 million emails were sent every minute last year. Add to that the new methods of communication developing and being favoured by companies and individuals, and it is easy to understand why the data created by companies during the course of a project is constantly growing – but as a result so is the task of e-disclosure. Much has been done in recent years to improve the efficiency and usefulness of the disclosure process in arbitration and court litigation.

Maren Strandevold, Associate at Haynes and Boone CDG,

This article, from Maren Strandevold, Associate at Haynes and Boone CDG, will discuss the usefulness of the tools and techniques available to parties in a construction dispute to deal with the data explosion.

Disputes in the construction sector are typically document heavy, particularly where the dispute includes a claim for delay on a big project. The document count can be in the hundreds of thousands and that in itself presents a number of challenges. The nature of the work creates further challenges: disputes are usually technical in nature and the relevant evidence is likely to include spreadsheets, drawings and photographs. Managing such documents, reviewing them for relevance and providing disclosure can be a real challenge and lawyers engaged in this type of work have to look at the tools available and consider carefully the most appropriate approach. Making the wrong choice can make the exercise both more costly and far more time consuming.

The basic toolkit

Whilst there are still lawyers who would prefer to print out all the documents and hand over hard copies, it is widely accepted that disclosure today requires the use of an e-disclosure platform that can process documents much more efficiently. A processing tool will also typically be used prior to uploading documents to a platform. In their most basic form, this allows you to:

• Sort documents by file type
• Run basic searching based on keywords and metadata
• De-duplicate documents.

Using these simple tools, you can start assessing the data available early on. It may be sensible to hive off certain types of documents, for example drawings, for review by expert witnesses. Similarly, it may be useful to ring fence photographs for human review as searching is difficult unless the photographs have been saved with meaningful titles. Even at this early stage, you can start prioritising the review and ensuring that the most appropriate resource is used.

Keyword searching

Keyword searching remains very popular as a method of locating relevant documents and ensuring that a “reasonable search” has been carried out. In the English courts, the forms that must be exchanged prior to the first case management conference (even under the pilot scheme for the Business and Property Courts which is due to start in January 2019) encourage parties to think about keyword searches at an early stage.

Keyword searches can be used to narrow down the document population and reduce the quantity of documents that have to be reviewed during the disclosure process but it is essential that you know your document population and what you might be looking for, as otherwise this method has its drawbacks. It is a very blunt tool and unless you understand the terms and phrases typically used on that particular project, you may end up with a significant volume of documents to review, a significant proportion of which may well not be relevant. Misspellings must also be accounted for, otherwise key documents will not be caught by a search, which can lead to important information being missed.

Analytical tools

The main alternative to keyword searching followed by manual review of documents that is often proposed is full-on predictive coding, which is discussed below, but this fails to consider the variety of other options available. For example, if you have a huge volume of emails, but know that a significant portion are irrelevant, it usually helps to see the domain listing – that is a list of all the email domains in the population. This information can be used to exclude irrelevant sources, such as news subscriptions, from the pool of data that requires review.

Alternatively, you could identify the key domains involved in the project and focus on reviewing correspondence passing between those domains, ie: you focus your review on emails passing between @employer.com and @contractor.com.

There are also some more sophisticated tools such as clustering and concept tools. These can be particularly useful if the claim comprises a number of different issues, for example if you have a delay claim with multiple relevant delaying events. The clustering and concept searching works to find patterns in the text contained in documents. Concept searching allows for more dynamic searching than keywords while clustering may assist by grouping together documents with similar content, so that documents relating to specific issues may be identified and reviewed together.

Predictive coding

There has been a lot of hype around predictive coding, with it being hailed as a cost-effective yet accurate way of categorising large numbers of documents. In construction disputes, however, the feeling has typically been that it is not appropriate. Predictive coding is good at identifying single issues and less good at dealing with technical documents (spreadsheets and drawings) and multiple issue cases, such as a delay case with hundreds of separate delaying events arising out of entirely separate factual matters.

But is it true that this renders predictive coding useless in a complicated delay claim?  I think not. As with a lot of the other technology available, it is very much a question of how you use it. For example, you can use the technology to rank documents so that you can focus the human review primarily on the most highly ranked documents. In addition, you would ideally conduct a review of a sample of the lower ranked documents, to find out if these need to be reviewed further or can all be considered irrelevant.

The existing technology can therefore be of use, even in cases with multiple issues and large volumes of technical documents. However, the technology is constantly evolving. Some e-disclosure providers have seen the need for technology to cope better with non-textual documents and are in the process of developing technology that can carry out predictive coding of images. There is already technology for facial recognition and image searching and this is now being harnessed for use in e-disclosure. This is largely untested at present, but could be the first step towards better management of technical documents.

The use of predictive coding on the right cases and in the right way can greatly reduce the amount of manual review required and the associated time costs. Computer-aided review is often more consistent than human review and it has the potential of reducing the overall cost of the exercise. However, this can only be achieved if those using the tools understand how to use them correctly and consider their application on a case by case basis.

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‘Elitist’ MAC report could cripple business post-Brexit

The release of the Migration Advisory Committee report has seen industry reacting with varying degrees of alarm and horror, with members of the construction industry raising concerns immediately.

The report advises a ban on foreign workers earning less than £30,000 a year from obtaining work visas following Brexit, with lower-skilled workers not achieving work permits at all and higher skilled EU workers not receiving preferential treatment.

With the latest ONS statistics showing the lowest level of net migration from the EU since 2012, this has also raised concerns as to how construction will cope with a reduction of a skilled labour supply from the EU post-Brexit.

Industry reaction immediately addressed the need for both lower skilled workers, with employers in this sector reliant on blue collar workers, and EU professionals who would be subject to a ‘surcharge’, saying it could cripple business.

The Freight Transport Association (FTA), which represents the UK’s logistics industry, has reacted angrily to the findings. FTA Head of Skills Sally Gilson explains: “The MAC report totally fails to recognise, and actively diminishes, the role of lower-skilled migrants within the UK’s economy, which is hugely disappointing from a logistics point of view. The job roles covered by these workers are often based in areas of low unemployment where competition for workers is already high, so Britain’s supply chain could easily be at risk if they are forced to return to their home countries. Yes, highly skilled workers are valuable to the economy, but so too are those whose work keeps us able to operate at home and at work, 24 hours a day. Academic achievement is not the only measure for value which should be applied to the UK workforce – everyone has their role to play in keeping the country moving and solvent.

“The logistics sector, especially when you consider roles such as HGV drivers and warehouse staff, is reliant on access to non-UK workers, currently employing 43,000 HGV drivers, 113,000 warehouse workers and 22,000 van drivers from the EEA – and even more during peak times of year like Christmas.  Without them, schools, shops, hospitals and retailers, as well as manufacturers and homeowners, will all find it harder to access the goods they need in order to conduct their daily lives.

“Due to the regulation of the sector, logistics businesses cannot immediately look to other non-EEA countries to help plug the skills shortages which losing these European workers will cause. And the problem is further compounded when you consider there are already more than 52,000 vacancies for HGV drivers nationwide. Losing the services of these vital EU workers after Brexit would be devastating to the nation’s ‘just in time’ economy – and next day deliveries would soon be a thing of the past.”

Efficient logistics is vital to keep Britain trading, directly having an impact on more than seven million people employed in the making, selling and moving of goods.

While the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) Chief Executive, Brian Berry, condemned the report, saying: “[The] report makes very worrying reading for the tens of thousands of small construction firms across the UK who are already deeply concerned about the skills shortage. Its recommendations ignore the pleas of construction employers who have called on the Government to introduce a visa system based on key occupations rather than arbitrary skill levels. Instead, the proposal is to apply the Tier 2 immigration system to EU workers, which would be disastrous for small and micro construction firms. “Even if tweaked and improved slightly, the Tier 2 system would not make provision for ample numbers of low skilled workers to enter the UK and these are people the construction industry relies upon. For the Government to make good on its construction and house building targets, it will need sufficient numbers of labourers as well as civil engineers and quantity surveyors.”

Berry continued: “It’s not at all clear that EU workers with important skills already in short supply, like bricklaying and carpentry, will not fall foul of a crude and limited definition of ‘high skilled’ worker. In addition, the report explicitly recommends that there should be no migration route for lower skilled workers with the possible exception for seasonal agricultural workers. There is also a vague suggestion that if there was a route for lower skilled workers, it should be aimed at younger people and not be open to workers of all ages. This is far too restrictive and simply won’t meet the needs of the construction industry.”

Berry concluded: “EU workers are vitally important to the UK construction sector. Nine per cent of our construction workers are from the EU and in London, this increases to one third. These workers have played a very significant role in mitigating the severe skills shortages we have experienced in recent years. The construction industry knows it needs to do much more to recruit and train many more domestic workers. However, given the important role migrant workers have played, and the already high levels of employment in the UK workforce, it is crucial that the post-Brexit immigration system allows us to continue to hire workers of varying skill levels, regardless of where they are from.”

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Fire door safety campaign

An online poll, conducted in support of Fire Door Safety Week, has highlighted some alarming statistics about fire doors and safety.

The poll, carried out by online trade supplier IronmongeryDirect and supported by the Fire Industry Association, illustrates an alarming lack of general public awareness of the life-saving role of fire doors which are a legal requirement in all commercial, public and multi-occupancy buildings.

The results are published in support of Fire Door Safety Week (24 September – 30 September) which aims to raise awareness of the importance of fire doors in saving lives.

Despite extensive media coverage about the dangers of inadequate fire protection in offices and homes since the Grenfell tragedy, less than 20% of tradespeople polled have seen an increase in demand for fire safety products or parts such as replacement intumescent strips for fire doors.

Most worrying was that 70% of respondents would not know who to contact if they noticed a problem with a fire door, while almost half the people surveyed admitted that they do not know how to identify a fire door. Over a third of repondents said they would prop a fire door open to let in fresh air or to give easier access for example.

Ian Moore, CEO at the Fire Industry Association, said: “Fire doors are one of many essential elements to keeping safe from fire. In all cases, a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment should be carried out by the responsible person – usually the building owner. A fire risk assessment should determine, through thorough inspection, any potential risks or hazards so that they may be resolved. If you are worried about hazards and risks from fire, you can always contact us, the Fire Industry Association, for free and impartial information and we will be able to direct you to an expert on the subject.”

This research highlights the need for tradespeople and the wider public to be more aware of the essential role that fire doors play in keeping them safe. Fire doors are specifically designed to withstand fire for between 30 and 240 minutes and, when used correctly, they can make a significant difference in saving lives and protecting buildings.

According to the British Woodworking Federation, the organisation behind Fire Door Safety Week, three million fire doors are installed each year. However, they remain a significant area of neglect and should be regularly checked and maintained by those responsible for the upkeep of the building.

Managing Director of IronmongeryDirect,Wayne Lysaght-Mason, commented: “We are now over a year on from the Grenfell Tower fire and it is disturbing that a significant proportion of the general public appear to lack basic fire door knowledge.”

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Telematics to drive construction industry revolution

Advances in technology are transforming the construction industry. From digitisation to drones, innovative new technologies are helping to increase quality, reduce costs and improve safety in all areas.

John Cameron, General Manager of Trimble Field Service Management, believes that the Internet of Things is poised to radically change the way service and maintenance operations are performed on equipment within the construction industry and sees telematics-driven connected workflows as being the key enabler for preventative maintenance. In this article, he discusses these latest innovations and the effect they are having on construction.

The Internet of Things is poised to radically change the way service and maintenance operations are performed on equipment within the construction industry. Whether equipment is owned, leased or rented, pressure is put on maintenance and repair teams to perform tighter SLAs. Construction jobs run on tight margins and have a lot of cross-dependencies between tasks. A broken piece of equipment can bring the entire project to a halt, causing loss of work and, ultimately, income.

A big focus has therefore been put on the Internet of Things (IoT) for preventative maintenance. Gartner agrees, stating that field service management processes must change to benefit from IoT devices and that he expects there to be 20 billion internet-connected things by 2020.

Telematics a key enabler for preventative maintenance

Advances in telematics technology are at the heart of the IoT for field service management revolution. Once regarded as being the basis for tracking the location of vehicles, today it can be extended to connect the entire service workflow. Indeed, telematics today can share real-time information and connect mobile workers in the field with the back office, customers and equipment.

When combined with deeper analytics systems, telematics-driven connected workflows offer a plethora of benefits to both construction businesses and equipment rental companies. One such benefit is switching the service model from a reactive, break-fix workflow to a preventative and, ultimately, predictive model. These advanced workflows require a tight connection from the asset/equipment to the service management system and telematics is the best candidate for providing this connection.

How it works

Many assets and equipment today are equipped with sensors, connected to cloud software, that can monitor telematics data. This data can include machine operating hours, the state of the motorised parts and health information such as faults and diagnostic codes. Any unexpected behaviour is visible remotely to the service or rental provider, including its exact location. The equipment sensors can automatically trigger a service call when it needs something repaired or is due for maintenance.

The future of operational efficiency lies in detecting and performing maintenance before failures occur. That way, service/rental organisations are not forced to react to emergencies after equipment has failed and construction businesses don’t have to deal with the more serious damage that can occur as a result of the domino effect a single failure can cause.

This proactive way of working allows service and rental companies to control their operations and solve equipment problems faster, whilst the construction company can get the most out of the equipment.

What’s more, adopting a preventive and predictive approach to service and maintenance as opposed to a break/fix service structure maximises the long-term usage. In the event of a vehicle, asset or piece of equipment breaking down, real-time intelligence about its location enables businesses to retrieve it for service immediately whilst a nearest available asset can be identified and reallocated, helping to minimise downtime. Furthermore, many businesses track service vehicles alongside assets and they can often be viewed on the same map. Identifying the nearest service technician to a broken down asset therefore becomes a simple task and this can improve response time considerably.

There are still many advantages to deploying telematics to connect assets even with break-fix workflows. Understanding the condition of the asset before deploying a technician will improve first time fix rates; which will drive higher customer satisfaction. This is often the first step in changing the service model.

Connecting assets from multiple suppliers

A challenge many construction businesses need to consider is how to connect to assets from multiple suppliers. Each supplier often has their own proprietary systems that have different data formats which make integration difficult and time consuming.

The construction industry is starting to incorporate data standards that help alleviate much of the effort required to establish connections to the assets. One such standard is the Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP). A standard protocol was recently adopted that allows for fault code and other information to be shared in a standard way. This standardisation helps create more interoperability in the market and will surely be a boost to connected workflows in this market.

Maximize equipment utilisation across job sites with telematics

The case for telematics technology to considerably improve the utilisation of assets and equipment across job sites is a simple one. Businesses can monitor the location of their assets on demand and generate utilisation reports to determine which are being under-utilised across sites. With this information, they are better placed to determine how best the assets should be deployed, if any should be reallocated, which types of equipment customers need most and compare owned to rented asset usage – streamlining the efficiency and profitability of their asset-dependent business.

Having the ability to monitor assets and equipment on demand can also help jobs remain on track. If an urgent job comes in that requires an asset be reallocated immediately, any idle units or those closest to the construction site can be identified and reassigned to ensure delays are not incurred.

What’s more, the ability to create accurate utilisation reports for each job site can help businesses to improve job bids and win more business. Knowing the actual hours it takes to build a parking lot of a particular size or a certain scale of building helps companies to bid competitively and can mean the difference between winning and losing a contract.

Prevent the loss or misuse of assets and equipment

A major challenge construction businesses face is the loss or theft of expensive equipment due to it being abandoned, misplaced or stolen once it reaches a job site. Over 10,000 high valued construction assets are reported as stolen annually, causing the annual cost of construction equipment theft to reach $1 billion.

Businesses equipped with telematics can significantly maximise recoverability rates. They are able to quickly locate their assets, eliminating time spent searching for missing equipment and avoiding the need to replace lost assets.

Many telematics solutions incorporate functionality that ensures that if an asset or piece of equipment changes location or has been disconnected, an alert will be emitted and the equipment or branch manager will receive an exception notification. This helps them to minimise misuse and theft as they can locate the asset immediately and act quickly to retrieve it.

The future of telematics

The future for telematics is certainly bright. As businesses within the construction industry increasingly look to extend their telematics capabilities to track their vehicles, workforce and assets, investing in telematics driven connected workflows, combined with deeper analytics systems, will reap many benefits. We will see businesses switching the service model from a reactive, break-fix workflow to a preventative and, ultimately, predictive model. What’s more, businesses ultimately need to ensure that they are allocating and using their equipment across sites as efficiently as possible. Those that do not have the visibility into the status of their assets to determine this will be much more prone to costly inefficiencies. These advanced workflows require a tight connection from the asset to the service management system and telematics is integral to providing this connection.

[1] *The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB)

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