Accelerated Construction Programmes and Covid-19

This week NZ has gone to level 3 and the construction sector has started ramping up again. But while we can get back on site and get projects underway, new regulations will pose a barrier to getting through the volume of work. I was at a processing plant last week and saw first hand the impact of social distancing. Work volume was down about 50% due to social distancing, and this was reflected in a halving of output. Looking at the construction industry, I initially thought a similar reduction would also apply. However, because of the way accelerated construction projects work - and many of our projects are accelerated, it will be affected even further. In an accelerated construction programme, you might have 4 or 5 trades operating at once, working in the same space. However, when you add in social distancing and are required to move to a sequential approach, waiting for one to finish before the next one starts, the time a project takes is going to stretch out further and further. It’s like changing from a 100 m sprint, where everyone runs at once, to a relay, where each trade passes the baton to the next as we race around the track. As you add more people to the mix, communication time increases exponentially. In addition, coordinating all the contractors and subcontractors in an efficient schedule will be complex. Taking this into account it is more realistic to expect 10-20% of pre Covid 19 volumes initially, especially as we get used to the situation. What options are available to us to negate such a significant reduction in capacity? We could move to double or triple shifts to try and get through more work in a day (a short term solution), we lower our output expectations until the restrictions are removed or we could find new methods of delivering efficiency. As it stands, we don’t have the level of coordination required to optimise efficiency in our work. Walking around and looking at the as-built deliverables as we have been doing is not going to cut it at level 3. Setting a task to a time is not detailed enough, we also need to add in a physical element of place and an ability to assess the interdependence between tasks. Which sounds an awful lot like 5D BIM . It would be a big shift to be able to do this; a toss up of persisting with what we have in the short term and hoping it goes back to normal, or anticipating we are in this position for a long length of time, in which case, we need to be able to solve this problem. While 5D BIM is a solution, the issues that stopped it being picked up pre-covid still exist. It is complicated, you need specialist operators, and the cost increase to implement has not yet been shown to benefit construction professionals. At BVT, we are currently investigating a third option. Not full 5D BIM, but a mix of current and new technologies which “bite-size” the important space and time information for contractors, without creating a new role or adding cost. Coming soon to a project near you…