Modeling Production for Complex Projects

[00:00:00] Gary Fischer, PE: So next up we have Ed McCann, who’s the senior director at Expedition Engineering, past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He currently leads the UK Infrastructure Client Group productivity improvement work stream. I could go on and on about his resume, but here’s the bottom line.

[00:00:21] Gary Fischer, PE: If it’s big and it’s important in the uk. Ed’s involved. He’s filling an important role on all kinds of projects, big infrastructure projects, really interesting. The Rolls-Royce small modular reactor program, site factory. This is the factory that’s gonna make SMRs. That’s really an interesting story. So with that I’ll turn it over to you, ed.

[00:00:47] Ed McCann: Great. Thank you very much for that. Gary, can you hear me okay? Is that Yeah,

[00:00:50] Gary Fischer, PE: we can see you fine. You’re not sharing yet.

[00:00:53] Ed McCann: Yeah, no. I’m just gonna share screen now. Bear me a second. Okay.

[00:00:58] Ed McCann: Look, thank you very much Gary and, others for the invitation to come along and present today. I, what I’m gonna do is I, feel like a bit of a fraud with all these experts on production systems engineering.

[00:01:13] Ed McCann: But I’m gonna talk a bit, basically go through a bit of a journey that I’ve been on personally and we’ve been on as an organization. Over the last I’m gonna say 30 years which has landed us in in this space of really being very interested in production systems engineering and what it offers in terms of project and program delivery.

[00:01:36] Ed McCann: But there’s a bit of a backstory to, this, which I, hope you’ll find interesting. And as I go along, I’ll pick out some messages that may. And some learning that we’ve got along the way that might help people as they try to get their heads around some of this stuff. Anyway, so it’s called seriously Fun Experiments in Engineering Practice.

[00:01:55] Ed McCann: And my sort of introduction to production systems engineering really starts with reading Todd’s book. And I imagine there are lots of people on this call who have read Todd’s book and thought, ah, there’s something interesting here. And I’ve, ripped out his five levers concept.

[00:02:11] Ed McCann: And I’m gonna use that as something of an armature to carry this presentation and talk about various parts of it and how we’ve been working with them and what, why they might be important, what you might do with them. The first part of this, I’m gonna, I’m talk about what I’ve spent most of my career and what my practice spends most of its time doing, which is in the product design area.

[00:02:31] Ed McCann: And I’m gonna show you a few projects. So this was when I joined Expedition as a startup practice, this was the project on the table. It was a big that’s an old a hundred year old bull ring in Barcelona. I dunno if anyone knows Barcelona. And it was a derelict structure that they were trying to keep.

[00:02:47] Ed McCann: And so the first job was how do you make that into a high value development? This was what ended up being done with it. The the observant among you may have noticed that it’s acquired a hundred meter spanning timber grid shell roof, and it’s now standing on stilts, not on the ground. And if you were to look underneath that, there’s a five story carpark underneath that.

[00:03:09] Ed McCann: And if you think about how you actually do something like that, you simply cannot design things like this without understanding the means by which you are gonna construct them or the production system. Here’s a cable car. Some of you may have been on, this in London. It was put up for the London Olympics.

[00:03:27] Ed McCann: We were the scheme designers for this project. It was taken forward and delivered by others afterwards. Again, this is, it’s quite a challenge doing this sort of stuff in the middle of a busy city in a rush for the Olympics and, it’s, the design is deeply connected to the means of construction.

[00:03:45] Ed McCann: The Infinity Bridge, I was the, this is one of my favorites. It’s a 180 meter long footbridge in the north of England. I’m gonna talk a little bit more about this because this epitomizes in our view the relationship between pro product design and production system design. And I said about seriously fun.

[00:04:07] Ed McCann: These are very serious things, but if what we tend to find is if you have fun doing them they turn out rather better. And this was opening day and this bridge was apparently the best thing that had happened to Stockton since the end of the second World War. And 20,000 local residents came out for a great big party and we took the office up there and drank far too much.

[00:04:24] Ed McCann: So it was, that was a good night. This is one that we didn’t quite get to build. This is an Antarctic research station. I was due to go out for a site visit to Antarctica for six weeks over Christmas. But my daughter had just been born and my wife told me she was gonna divorce me if I went to Antarctica for Christmas.

[00:04:42] Ed McCann: So I didn’t end up going, sent one of my colleagues who got lots of photographs of penguins. And a lot of test information from bulldozers, dragging things around on recently laid snow. But the particular subtlety of this one is that unlike most buildings, this one was designed to walk. And it’s an environment where for various reasons it needed to walk.

[00:05:02] Ed McCann: And we got a long way into this. They contract the price. This, we were good to go on this, but they. Yeah, it went another way. By the way. It doesn’t walk this fast. It wouldn’t walk this fast. This was done in an era when computers went a lot slower, so computer speeds have gone up. This thing, things have accelerated.

[00:05:22] Ed McCann: But anyway, if anyone ever wants some walking buildings, we know how to do it. This was another I was project director for this for the engineering on this. This is the London 2012 Olympic Velodrome. Again, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about that. But again, a very challenging project in I say challenging.

[00:05:40] Ed McCann: I if you do it right, they’re not challenging, but it’s a great project. It’s a really enjoyable project. And the way that the design worked with the construction, I’m gonna touch on slightly later. This is opening day. We were briefed to make the fastest velodrome in the world, and I think we can safely say we did three world records.

[00:05:57] Ed McCann: Went on day one, four more in the Olympics with, I think it was 21 gold medals that the British team won in there. That was a, that was quite good fun. Banco Intesa Sanpaolo in Northern Italy in Turin. If you ever go there, you’ll see that Renzo piano is the architect for this building. And I’m gonna show you some shots about the complexity or the challenge of getting that to work as a production system and a design.

[00:06:25] Ed McCann: And the final one I’m gonna flick up on the screen is the, this is the, essentially the Greek National Opera house and library, again, with Renzo piano. It’s an earthquake zone. That roof structure is a hundred meter by a hundred meters square. And it’s principle, structural components are made of ferrocement.

[00:06:41] Ed McCann: And if you, mostly you won’t know much about ferrocement, I’ll show you a little bit in a moment. Anyway, the key point, the key takeaway from all of those projects is that you, those sorts of products, you cannot sensibly and economically design them unless you co-design the process by which you are gonna put them into place.

[00:07:02] Ed McCann: And I think this is something that we knew as a practice, I knew as a person for many, years at an intuitive level. What I found when I read Todd’s book actually was it was naming something we knew, but didn’t really have a vocabulary to describe and we didn’t need, didn’t really know quite why these things were so tightly linked.

[00:07:22] Ed McCann: But anyway, that was that. So back to our, friendly velodrome there. So what’s interesting about this is we set the production system rules before. We really got very far with the design and the sort of thing we said here is that thing has to be self stable at every stage of its erection as to say you’re not allowed to have temporary supports on anything.

[00:07:41] Ed McCann: We we, set production rules, which said it’s concrete up to a certain level and it is steel. And then it is steel and it’s clad in timber. So we, and the reason we went for timber for so much of this was for the facility with which you could do. Complex geometry, modularization using timber as a an element, and you’ll see that later.

[00:08:01] Ed McCann: So this structure was built with no scaffolding, no temporary support for the structure, which if you’ve ever done stadia, you’ll understand is pretty rare. You can see the structure standing there in that’s the, so Steel’s on, it’s about ready to get a cable net roof at this point. And that structure’s standing as you can see without any temporary supports.

[00:08:21] Ed McCann: And the, yeah, ready to roll. This is the this was a bit of fun. The construction manager did a time lapse as they were putting the roof cable net up. I dunno whether you’ll hear the sound, but it’s got queen’s bicycle, going. And what you can see here is you think about the way you normally build roofs, the amount of interim supports, temporary propping access requirements, and the, merits of the cable net are immediately obvious.

[00:08:48] Ed McCann: When you see this went up in a day and a half, I think. Whoops. Moving on. Other things that we were able to do here were, so all of those cables are basically cut to tolerance. And so you’ve really gotta work hard on the design of this to make sure, so they’re cut to a tolerance, plus or minus two millimeters, and they’re brought to site.

[00:09:08] Ed McCann: They’re 140 meters long. Your structure better be in the right place, or you better be able to push them together to get the tolerances to work. When we were finished, by the way, and it was all loaded up at the center point of the span the structure was within 14 millimeters vertically of where we had predicted it would be in the structural analysts who did the work got a bottle of champagne for that.

[00:09:32] Ed McCann: He, so I talked a bit about timber. So the roof structure. How do you do these things because it looks desperately complex doing these two dimensional geometries. And so what, we’ve got here is a very serious bit of thinking about how you make a standard node that you then do 3000 times and a thousand cassettes, and you make the cassettes out of timber, but you use a geometry.

[00:09:53] Ed McCann: In this case, it’s a toal. It’s a section of a toroidal donut, which it minimizes the number of element types. And in any event, you can rejig timber so easily to create these timber panels that it was irrelevant. People found it very easy to do, and you can see a nice, safe, comfortable operation.

[00:10:11] Ed McCann: They’re walking around on the roof, they sling the panels in, they bolt it down, they move on. And here we are timber on the facade. Again, no scaffolding, no overhead lifting. Everything’s done from the ground put into place with manipulators and MEWPs, so it’s safe, easy very easy to systemize this process compared to anything that’s dangling off at height.

[00:10:37] Ed McCann: You can see those sort of things there on Athens. So Athens, I said ferrocement. Now ferrocement is used in the roof structure here. Now, there was no history of ferrocement. Nobody had built serious structure out of ferrocement ever. People had made model boats out of it, and so we more or less had to invent.

[00:10:53] Ed McCann: The sort of methodology and techniques for doing this with the local labor force. This building, at the time, I think it was a 700 million pound building or 700 million euro building in today’s money, it’s a, it’s at least a $2 billion building that we’re talking about here. So it was a big international contracting JV who had to commit to building this thing out of a, material that had never been used before.

[00:11:15] Ed McCann: And so we worked with them, with the university’s developed methodologies. For doing it, we did testing, we rigged it up, and in the end we built a site factory using local labor. I think there was a 200 people employed in there to make this stuff and put the panels on the roof. And so this is an application of onsite factories to enable smooth process.

[00:11:36] Ed McCann: And bigger than you can travel by road stuff. So that was that one. And then finally the Infinity Bridge. I said I’d talk a little bit about the Infinity Bridge and here it goes. So this is the Slender is this bridge, by the way. Won the institution of Structural Engineers Supreme Award for structural engineering excellence, which is a sort of.

[00:11:55] Ed McCann: Their best structure in the world this year. In fact, the, in the Velodrome won it as well. So we won it two, two years out. Three, which was quite, quite a feat at the time. And what I’m gonna say about this is a, again, anybody who fabricates stuff or builds stuff will look at something like this and go, that is a complex thing to do, but it really, it isn’t.

[00:12:14] Ed McCann: So what we did was we built it built it. Computationally as a kit of parts, and we worked every part. So there are about 30 separate elements in the thing. And the only thing that has high variability in it is the arch. And that systematically when you go down another level is the same thing all the way.

[00:12:32] Ed McCann: It’s a tapered box gird. And so working with the fabricators in the supply chain, this is one of our founders Sean Walsh, working closely with Cleveland Bridge, who fabricated this thing on how to do the nodes. Again, the geeks in the room will spot a 120 mil thick full penetration, but weld there onto a bit of high strength steel to hold those two plates together.

[00:12:56] Ed McCann: And but it’s basically done like this working with people to go, how does this stuff fit together? How do we detail it and structure it so that it goes together, it’s engineering, working with the makers so that we can get it to work on site and it goes like this. And when you’re finished, what I think is quite interesting about this is when you work like this, you get stuff that’s economical and actually beautiful.

[00:13:17] Ed McCann: And the resolution of these details is elegant. It’s simple, it’s balanced. And so you get the architecture for free if you work like this. We had a precasting yard on site there, so we made the deck units. And again, if you look there, we’ve removed topping. Those little insets on the side are drainage gutters, so we have no drainage system.

[00:13:38] Ed McCann: We shed off the site using, subtle details. All of the M&E kit is carried in the balustrade. Those are those are cast units on the edge to minimize the fabrication requirement. They’re all identical, those hangers. And so it goes. So what I’m talking to there is really in our experience, if you put product design and process design right next to each other and you working really, hard, you get really good outcomes.

[00:14:02] Ed McCann: And the epitome of that for me personally, and some of you on the call may have this experience too, was when I worked on Terminal five, I was the water engineering team lead for several years there, and we sat with. The builders and the client and we designed every detail together and and it was an exemplar project from the perspective of putting together all of the relevant expertise to get something that was quick, easy, safe to build and great to operate.

[00:14:32] Ed McCann: And that was a fun one as well. ’cause I live very close to Heathrow and that’s my kids taking ’em down there shortly after opening. So they’re bouncing around there. They tell everyone that Dad designed the drains on terminal five, which is probably not quite true. Anyway, around that time. So this is, all of that stuff I’ve showed you is, up to about two is in a period sort of 95 through to 2010.

[00:14:53] Ed McCann: And in the middle of that, Chris Wise, one of the founders of our practice myself spent, I think it was about eight years, every Friday teaching a creative design program Imperial College in London. Which with hundred students. And what struck us was how little our students, these are all very, these, this is the Imperial College is like Ivy League for the uk, so pretty prestigious place.

[00:15:16] Ed McCann: And what was astonishing was how little the students knew about construction. We had people inventing a thing called a crane because they didn’t really know such a thing existed. There were the the reality of their understanding of construction was really limited. And so we found it very hard to talk sensibly to them about how you design stuff.

[00:15:33] Ed McCann: ’cause they could, they didn’t really, just didn’t know how things were built. So we rapidly morphed this program into a make test and fail program. So we got ’em building stuff with paper and, models and so on and they learn. One of the things they learn pretty quickly is it’s easy to draw stuff and it’s really hard to join it together.

[00:15:50] Ed McCann: And it’s really hard to build it high if you, unless you’ve got some magic step ladders. And we used to surprise ’em at the end of workshops like this by dragging out industrial fans and then blowing away their. Bits of work and the lady in red in the background laughing like a drain there. Went on to be a investment banker and made far more money than the rest of us, but there we are.

[00:16:09] Ed McCann: We realized though that you could only go so far with paper. And Chris and I were presenting an industry shindig at some point. And one of the participants was a contractor, a guy called Steph Stefano of John Dore Construction. And he heard what we were saying and he came up at the end and he said, Boys if I give you 50,000 quid, can you teach him how to do construction properly?

[00:16:29] Ed McCann: And so we invented something called the construction area, which is a. It’s gone on to be quite big. I’ll show you a couple of slides. But basically you take students away for a week and you do real scale construction. And this is a floating platform. So we built a lake and we, in a week they go in, it’s, they have a dry dock.

[00:16:47] Ed McCann: At one end, they build a reinforced concrete box. They flood the dry dock, they float it out, and then they drag it into position, which has been prepared from a boat at the other end of this lake. And so these were the early years of construction aum. And we, lost the occasional student, but they were the idiots, so we didn’t mind that too much.

[00:17:06] Ed McCann: And then on the so just FYI, if anyone’s interested in things like the construction, you, I have no interest in it at all. Now it’s a not-for-profit that was set up, but they’ve now had over 14,000 students in the UK gone through that week long process. And I, hope and believe that we’re turning the dial slightly with Abu bunch of people who will go on to be design engineers having a proper understanding.

[00:17:30] Ed McCann: Of the construction process and a, real appreciation of the work that constructors do in sometimes quite tough circumstances. So that’s the construction area. That brings us up to about 2010 and, just we, started getting quite interested around that time in what I’ve, labeled here is design deficiencies and it was triggered by a series of things.

[00:17:52] Ed McCann: ’cause you live in your own world, you do your own design. We were doing our own stuff. And the Olympics was quite interesting. So the major venues on the Olympics, so we were on the Velodrome, which is. It’s up, up the other end of the park. You can hardly see it’s tucked away over there. I don’t know whether you can see my mouse but what we used to do is the venue leads would invite each other round and show each other what they were doing and what we found.

[00:18:16] Ed McCann: Surprising when we went round the venues was just how much, how hard it seemed to be. And in particular when we went inside the aquatics and there was so much steel in the aquatics center, we just couldn’t get our heads around it. And we built the Velodrome, which is normally the same size as the aquatics center, and about half the time.

[00:18:33] Ed McCann: That they built the aquatics center and it was a different challenge. I don’t mean to overstate that, but we were curious about this. And and so were other people and so we, we started doing this comparative study on essentially how much material was being used, normalized around roof area, floor area, and seat area for all the stadiums at London, but also other international comparators.

[00:18:56] Ed McCann: And what we found was an absolutely gargantuan variation. In the total amount of largely steel, but steel and concrete that was used in these stadia. And I just don’t think people really understand. If you look there, so the velodrome system, so our embodied carbon, which is a mod measure in a sense of the cost and quantity of materials is down at 0.6.

[00:19:19] Ed McCann: Essentially per square meter of roof. And you’ve got things like the Beijing National Stadium is 9.3, it’s 18 times more. And the aquatic center, the one I just talked about, there was six times more per square meter of roof areas. And I don’t think most clients really appreciate that different design approaches generate such huge difference in, in, material content, and I’m just talking about materials here. And that’s Chris Wise there, who’s the other one of the founders. And, I did the teaching with, and we worked together, we still work together now. But he was sufficiently stimulated by this issue that he won the mill medal in, I think it was 2011 or something like that, maybe it was 2012.

[00:20:00] Ed McCann: And he did a lecture called Enough Is Enough, where he stood in front of the industry and said, do you realize this is going on? And we actually funded a PhD student to go and look at a few buildings and we stirred up quite a lot of interest in a couple of university programs research programs, and started looking at it.

[00:20:16] Ed McCann: And this is one of them, it’s the study which had Bath and Cambridge in it. And they, went away and had a look at this and they came back with some really quite perhaps not surprising, but interesting stats. And I’ll I’ve got the website there. You can go and have a look at all their work, but I’m here.

[00:20:32] Ed McCann: For example, material use per square meter on similar schemes by different engineers from the standard engineering companies varied by up to 70% plus or minus 35% the mean. That’s fascinating. Why are engineers doing the same stuff? Getting such different answers is a question that is worthy of attention.

[00:20:53] Ed McCann: And this is another group out of Cambridge, the use less group concluded that 36% of structural material designed and specified by the engineers was unnecessary to make code requirements. And what was interesting inside that was they found that typically design houses were putting a 1.25. Additional factor of safety above and beyond that required for full compliance with design codes.

[00:21:15] Ed McCann: If I was a client, I’d be rather interested in that ’cause that is a lot of money. Anyway, so that, on that goes and that brings us forward another four or five years. And we, started looking at construction challenges, triggered actually by a glass of wine after a bad day in the office. And it wasn’t a really bad day for us, but I was with some friends and, we were, building, we’re on site doing that thing on the left, Brentford Lock West at the time.

[00:21:41] Ed McCann: And one of my colleagues walked around the site and looked over the fence and saw that. Where we had specified clay drainage pipes, the drainage subcontractor had put in plastic PVC pipes like you see on the right hand side there. And now the, thing that the subtlety of this was we’d specified clay because there was residual hydrocarbon contamination in the site.

[00:22:02] Ed McCann: It was an old brownfield site. And the PVC pipes are not warranted for those circumstances. And indeed, if you ask the PVC suppliers, they’ll say no, Can’t put it anywhere near. Hydrocarbons of the sort we had now, it was very low levels and it probably wasn’t an issue, but the poor subcontractor had, basically changed a spec of their own volition in a sense, without checking with anyone, and had put a lot of this stuff in and he had to take it all out and replace it with clay.

[00:22:29] Ed McCann: And I was reflecting on the fact that was pretty dire for that person’s business, which may well have gone bust as a result of something like this. These were small companies. And it was a lot of work that they had to redo and over a glass of wine. It was speculating with a friend of mine. I wonder how much mistakes cost our industry whether we do rework or we don’t, do I wonder how much and does anyone know?

[00:22:50] Ed McCann: So we got sufficiently interested in that with some other friends at the Institution of Civil Engineers and we managed to assemble a fighting fund of about a hundred thousand pounds to do a research project. And we did a research project to go away and find out how much. Error, avoidable error cost our industry.

[00:23:08] Ed McCann: And when we got to the end of that, and it was funded by 17 different groups. What we concluded was that error, avoidable error costs our industry 21% on a, on average, on outturn costs with a range of between 10 and 25, depending on which industry sector you’re in. And that, and so that, that, is a pretty stark reflection as a proportion of our overall spending in the uk.

[00:23:33] Ed McCann: That as a proportion of the total is more than we spend on the entire transport infrastructure budget. And and anybody who’s not interested in 21% waste in as a result of nothing more than error is in my mind, missing an opportunity Anyway. The group who funded that set up a not-for-profit called the Get Right Initiative, and you can see what they do there.

[00:23:57] Ed McCann: They’ve trained their training. People in error avoidance and cultural changes. They’ve done 11 and a half thousand people on that in the last three years or four years. And they do research. And again, there’s links there you can go to if you’re interested. What was really interesting about this though was that the root causes of these error turned it out not to be what we thought.

[00:24:16] Ed McCann: We thought it was all gonna be, trade skills were inadequate and that the contractors were a bit foolish. But what turned out to be the case was that the majority of the causes were associated with white collar activity around. Construction planning design, late design changes, poor communication, design information, poor quality culture.

[00:24:35] Ed McCann: Let’s say let’s, not say, but six out the top 10 are design or planning related with number one being inadequate planning of the construction operations, which some of you on the call may recognize, but it did cause us to shift our focus slightly into getting the design and the construction planning right.

[00:24:52] Ed McCann: Anyway, around this time we were commissioned by HS two, which is the, big railway, the sort of, depending on who you listen to, anywhere between 50 and a hundred billion pound railway that we’ve got going on in the UK at the moment to help them develop a productivity improvement strategy.

[00:25:09] Ed McCann: So they recognized that they weren’t getting the. Production rates, outputs value for money that we were hoping for. And we had an extraordinary opportunity over three years to do deep dive studies into the processes. So design and, installation associated with major activities like earthworks, viaducts construction.

[00:25:28] Ed McCann: We looked at reinforced concrete processes. We looked at construction planning, scheduling supervision, and if you totted it up, we probably got paid to acquire. I don’t know, 10 PhDs worth of knowledge about the processes of construction and their deficiencies. And we built quite a sort of understanding around this.

[00:25:49] Ed McCann: So what was going on and in parallel, we got asked to do now it’s over 20 design and construction efficiency reviews on projects with an aggregate value. Over 20 billion quid across road, rail, nuclear, maritime, big buildings. And so where we’ve got to after all of that is we’ve, built up a sort of pretty comprehensive understanding of the full set of issues that you come across in delivery.

[00:26:14] Ed McCann: And a lot of these are way upstream. They’re in the sort of requirement setting, project set up approvals, gaining, and so on from perhaps the key focus of this, this, conference but we’ve developed a series of tools and frameworks, the DRI nine drivers framework, what drives cost.

[00:26:34] Ed McCann: If you really want to grip cost, and actually you can substitute time and value in there as well. You get the same answer. These are the things you actually have to grip. And we began to recognize that you really needed to focus on process. And this brings us back into the territory of production, systems engineering.

[00:26:50] Ed McCann: Remember, at this point, we don’t really have a language. To describe what we are looking at. We are stumbling around trying to find a sort of conceptual framework that captures what we’re talking about, but we got to the point that you really needed to focus on process and the enablers of process and, how process efficiency was affected.

[00:27:08] Ed McCann: And we got to I suppose by just thinking about it to the idea that you had to adopt systems and systems of systems thinking to understand what was going on and to develop interventions. One of the things we picked up along the way, one of the reports that is most significant and least read is on the right hand side there, and it’s called Changing to Compete.

[00:27:30] Ed McCann: And what that report says was that, and they looked at hundreds of infrastructure projects, is that engineering construction project productivity was plus or minus 20 to 30% better or worse than average. What that meant was that the best performing project. Were twice as good as the worst performing projects.

[00:27:48] Ed McCann: And it was nothing to do with innovation. It was to do with the quality of their teams and the way that they did the job. And this is really interesting ’cause because what it tells us is that if we can understand properly the root causes of poor performance, then there is a massive. Opportunity available to us without getting funky and being particularly innovative.

[00:28:11] Ed McCann: We just have to get the worst to perform as well as the best, and we’ll have improved the performance of our industry by 30%. Which I think is a very interesting, and it, sits with me. I recognize it when we look at these projects and so we, generally advocate that you’re better off focusing on getting good performance out of what you’ve got, rather than chasing ephemera and applying shiny new tech to really busted process.

[00:28:40] Ed McCann: And the other thing that we picked up along the way, we were reflecting on what the differences. ’cause it’s often said to us, you need to learn from manufacturing. What has manufacturing done? And Todd and I don’t entirely agree about this slide, but what we find, it captures quite a lot of what we think is going on as you try and go through.

[00:28:57] Ed McCann: A journey of industrialization and I’ve changed the wording slightly after Todd and my last argument on the subject. But I do think that we find, if you read these books, the sort of themes you get is you need to stabilize the environment within which a process operates standardized process and products.

[00:29:13] Ed McCann: And in this next section, I’m gonna, I’m gonna really roll through into having. Done all of that. What are we doing now? And so I’m gonna show you some of the projects which are effectively leaning on the understanding that we have developed through this process. So we’re gonna see where we are seeing this stuff and using this stuff in practice.

[00:29:34] Ed McCann: So Gary started off by saying a little bit about the Rolls Royce site factory. A guy up on the right hand side. There is a chap called John Prothero, who works for Bam which is a construction company. And he had been, he’s been involved in nuclear delivery for probably 20 years. And so lot knows a lot about the challenges and he had been challenged by Rolls Royce as a manufacturing company and they basically said to him, why is construction so crap?

[00:30:00] Ed McCann: Why can’t you do what we do in manufacturing and get cheaper every year rather than more expensive? And he gave it quite a lot of thought. And I was introduced to him in 20, I think it was 2018. By the CEO of BAM Nuttall. And John introduced me and said, look, what I’ve realized is that the disruption to process the protection of the environment, the protection of the work process associated with these large nuclear multi-year programs is so problematic that we would be better off building a giant shed and doing the entire nuclear power station inside it.

[00:30:33] Ed McCann: And, everyone says, I’m mad, but I reckon it’s worth a go. And so I said, okay, let’s let, we’ll have a go. So he said, all right, here’s a few quid. Go away and see if you can design something that’s big enough and can be erected fast enough, and then taken away afterwards in little bits to be, to go on and build the next nuclear reactor.

[00:30:53] Ed McCann: And so we work together with them and a, really excellent supply chain to come up with what in front of you there, which looks like a giant box, but if I told you it was 350 meters long, it’s a 120 meter clear span inside 70 meters high, and it has as many as you like. But it has it’s currently specified 30.

[00:31:14] Ed McCann: Roof mounted multi-layered crane systems, which basically does all of the cranage in the way that they do it in advanced manufacturing facilities. And what this does in terms of the operation of assembling and building a nuclear power station in terms of the program, the schedule duration, and the ease, the quality control is, we think absolutely revolutionary.

[00:31:40] Ed McCann: It’s certainly at the heart of the Rolls Royce, SMR Program as a key component of their, business case. Yeah, watch this space. And I just I, was out Mammoet who are working on this with us and along with Billington’s and, a number of others. And I just thought I’d show you this because we were out in Holland.

[00:32:03] Ed McCann: A little while ago with Mammoet were doing their thing, and I was standing there with one of the seniors from Rolls Royce watching them demonstrate how they were gonna do this strand jacking operation. This the erection sequence involve 8,900 ton strand jack coordinated lift. And when they heard this rolls Roy said, oh my God, has anyone ever done that?

[00:32:27] Ed McCann: And Mammoet said they’d done 60, but not 80, but they’d lifted 60,000 tons. So the 35,000 tons we have to lift here, were within their sort of comfort zone. But as I stood in front of this operation with the, commercial director for Rolls Royce and, I turned to her and I said, yeah it’s, all just reassuringly boring, isn’t it?

[00:32:47] Ed McCann: Because it all, it’s like a slow motion dance, carefully planned, properly equipped, utterly predictable in the way that they do it. And yes, reassuringly boring is what I like to see on a construction site. Anyway, on just boring getting onto standard product. So this is a manhole ring. I’m gonna talk here about standard product and a little bit about standard process.

[00:33:11] Ed McCann: So it seems in our industry, like someone has an idea and then that’s it. It’s like they’ve invented the perfect manhole ring and we are never gonna think about it again. So that British standard manhole ring hasn’t changed since I was a boy and and that, and yet. It is ridiculous to imagine that today we’re still installing these thing of four-legged chains, DS shackles, cranes, rigged up backhoe back actors and men wandering around, and that’s what we’ve got.

[00:33:39] Ed McCann: Is it for doing this operation? If this was a manufacturing operation, this would be done completely differently and I’m quite interested in that sort of stuff. So we’ve been doing quite a lot of work on. Standard product. This is a piece for our National Rail Organization, network rail. Those humble little things along the edge of platforms called copings, currently in the uk.

[00:33:59] Ed McCann: You, design each of them individually. I know that sounds an utterly extraordinary thing, but it is true that they measure them. And then they, so, if you’re doing a project you, specify every single one of them. And so we did a project with them over, it was a multi-year project working with the supply chain, basically grinding through how do we reduce the material content and the cost associated with the humble process of installing 10,000 of these each year.

[00:34:24] Ed McCann: And what was encouraging was at the end of that process we were down at by 20 summer 2022, we had taken two thirds of the. Carbon or material content out of it. And the project costs were down at 50% down and that is out of working progressively. We are treating these things like products with a life cycle rather than imagining that you’ve invented the perfect coping at the start of the 20th century and no one’s ever gonna change it.

[00:34:53] Ed McCann: Another one. So we’ve been appointed, we won a competition to redesign the highways. The gantry the sign gantry system for the UK Road Network. And what you’ve got here is the same sort of thinking. So this is very much, it’s design for assembly on site, kit of bits. Everything is sized to fit in a particular, on a particular load.

[00:35:16] Ed McCann: The, and it’d be installed of HiAbs and, connected up in a very simple way. Rationalized rationalize, for rapid and easy installment and operating. If you ever see the sort of we’ve got in England, you’ll realize that’s quite sweet by comparison. Another one. We’ve got the first one of these when in last weekend, is an access for all bridges.

[00:35:39] Ed McCann: This is again, for network rail. So this is a modular deployable bridge. I’m not gonna spend too much time on that one. You can go and have, look, there’s loads of info sort of stuff on the website, but same sort of idea, standard product. Work hard with the supply chain to optimize it for design and installation.

[00:35:57] Ed McCann: Changing tack slightly. This is a piece working for a contractor. So we got a call from a contractor here who had. They’re installing a big quay wall. I think it’s about 400, 500 meter long quay wall with big piles going in and tie anchors going back to a wall behind them. And they weren’t getting anything like the production rate they needed, so they were way off target.

[00:36:19] Ed McCann: And so we went, out to site and worked with the team and we did what many were just called standard time emotions stuff, but working with them to optimize the machinery, eliminate non-value, adding operations and redesign some of the connection details. And it was quite impressive in the sense that we halved the installation time just by working with the team and they came up with most of the ideas themselves.

[00:36:42] Ed McCann: It was really just putting a process that allowed them to think about doing it differently. So that was quite interesting. This is a, little reflection. I don’t like tower cranes, but that picture there is, I’m sitting in a bar in Amsterdam and watching that thing do nothing for about three hours because the hook was tied up doing something and just thinking about how ridiculous it was.

[00:37:06] Ed McCann: That we depended so utterly on a single hook of one of these monstrosities. And so I sketched something. He said, why can’t you have one of these? I’ll have multiples of those and I’ll have a sliding counterweight and I can go up and over each other and could that work. And I went back into the office and asked some of my colleagues, go and have a go see if you can make that work.

[00:37:24] Ed McCann: And they came up with this, which works. So that works. We can pre-program, we can sling stuff around, blah, blah, blah, blah. That works. I went to a crane supplier who laughed when I showed him. He says yeah, we invented that about 20 years ago, he said, but we make quite a lot of money out of renting out tower cranes, so why God’s good earth, we would want to do this anyway.

[00:37:46] Ed McCann: So another one we’re doing at the moment. HS two. Euston is a pretty big railway station, 450 meters long. An average about 80 meters wide. A high speed rail station. And what this is they, had a problem that the, essentially the station on the table was un unaffordable. And what we did was we got to the bottom of why it was unaffordable and came up with the logistics led redesign.

[00:38:12] Ed McCann: And so what we understood was what was driving the progress here. The key capacity constraint was on the muck-away and the materials to the site. They’ve got a very restricted logistical opportunity here, and so we basically designed the entire station on the idea that it would move forward at 14 meters a week.

[00:38:31] Ed McCann: So every single of every single operation sits within a footprint, a strip footprint of 14, or in some cases, 28 meters. And this was absolutely revolutionary in terms of the duration of the project. It halve the duration of the project. And did a very on these projects, I dunno whether but on these sort of projects, certainly in the UK at least 70%, sometimes as much as 90% of the costs are a function of time.

[00:38:58] Ed McCann: And so attacking durations, overall durations, particularly when you’ve got very high supervisory costs, turns out to be really important. And so it was here and it’s around this time I read Todd’s book and I was introduced to Todd by Simon Murray, a mutual friend. From T5 days. And I was very struck by the language that was being used there.

[00:39:21] Ed McCann: And, it was like a lot of things we were playing around with and thinking and labeling wrong, suddenly had proper names. And it’s been quite quite a moment for us actually to have a conceptual framework to map a what you might call a worldview or a, an experience set on. And so when we go this is another one we’re doing, this is playing around with tooling.

[00:39:42] Ed McCann: So it’s another big quay wall. And they were planning to have an eight pile gate. And so we went in there and played around with batch size and said, look, are you better off? With doing one pile and move on and, or maybe two piles and carry the gate off the piles. And so this exercise of essentially retooling coming up with a different design of a piling gates to enable a a, higher production rate, safer operation and so on.

[00:40:08] Ed McCann: And so that’s happening now. They’re out inside doing that. That is reducing time not as notable as some of the other ones we’ve done, but there is a sort of 10 to 20% reduction in overall durations by tuning the batch size there. How am I doing for time? I think I’ll draw it to a close.

[00:40:26] Ed McCann: There’s another one looking at rock armor. This is on a big nuclear power station job in the uk and trying to avoid the need to build from the beach by going for a different set of construction operations using very long reach. So these are. That’s a hundred ton machine with a 35 meter jib with cameras on the boom to allow blind placement and excavation so you don’t have to.

[00:40:48] Ed McCann: The problem here is there’s a, wall that stops you seeing where you are doing your work, and that’s unacceptable. But this had profound impacts on schedule and environmental footprint. Very quickly. Concrete package schedule recovery. Again, using the sort of techniques that SPS and some of you’re playing around with.

[00:41:08] Ed McCann: We took a call from a CEO of concrete frame contractor who’s doing this rather complex. It’s a complex bit of, concrete in work in central London. More complicated than it looks because of the detailing of it. And so we went in and just basically working with the team. They were on, they were doing 12 day cycle times with a team of 130, and within two or three weeks working with ’em, they were actually maybe four weeks from start to finish.

[00:41:37] Ed McCann: They were actually delivering, it wasn’t theoretical, a six day pour cycle, and their, team size was shriveling like mad towards a target on which they priced a job of 70. I’m not sure quite where they’ve got to on team size, but they’ve got the cycle time sorted. And that was really about going in and, challenging with them how they were running the onsite onsite to offsite logistics, the onsite logistics.

[00:41:59] Ed McCann: And and actually it was quite a, an interesting piece on how the core sort of street strategic design connections in the core, which also helped quite a lot. And then what’s on the desk at the moment is Zen Street, so another big railway station where what we are doing is we’ve got a slide, a 270 meter long, 80 meter spanning roof over this site.

[00:42:22] Ed McCann: And so we are basically now going in setting up a site factory assembly, jacking arrangements and doing all that sort of stuff. And again, using the same sort of logic of get your batch size right, understand the flow of materials, minimize stockpiles WIP. All the rest of it. And it is, we’re finding it to be and our clients are finding it to be frankly like revolutionary.

[00:42:46] Ed McCann: They love it. And my punchline, so where does all that lot come together? So we I, we are playing a key role in the drafting of what is gonna be a, British standard which is intends to control productivity, management of force. People to manage productivity on infrastructure projects. And so the department for Transport, the nuclear outfits the Environment Agency, the high Speed Rail, have all committed to adopt this.

[00:43:14] Ed McCann: And in this document we effectively drive people. To do the sort of things that we’ve been talking about here and you are talking about, about actually planning construction Pro projects properly and showing that they’re doing it. So watch this space. It’s due to go live probably third or fourth quarter next year, and we’ll know whether it’s doing anything within a year or two of that.

[00:43:36] Ed McCann: But I think our industry reacts to standards and regulation in a way it doesn’t react to please for good behavior. We’ll see where we get to with that. Anyway, I’ll stop there. I’ve gone too long. I know, but apologies for that and I stopped sharing.

[00:43:50] Gary Fischer, PE: No worries, Gary. It was one incredible dense discussion of your journey.

[00:43:58] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s fun to watch you go from product, process design, bringing those together and now moving into the other three levers. Really, you make the case that you’re outta your mind to do. Design work without thinking about how you’re gonna make it, how you’re gonna build it. It’s just foolish. And, it explains a whole lot of why projects perform so poorly when that thinking hasn’t happened.

[00:44:25] Gary Fischer, PE: We’re, gonna have, unfortunately, we’re gonna have to move on. Got a few in, we got some questions. And so just in general. We’ll get your questions back to the presenter and we’ll broker that answering those questions if it doesn’t come in anonymously in, the interest of time here.

[00:44:41] Gary Fischer, PE: So Ed, thank you very much for that. No problem. Again, man, there’s a lot packed in that. I’m gonna have to watch your presentation a couple of times to absorb all that, but if you’re, if you like engineering, that was like a big chocolate sundae. That was awesome stuff. So thank you.

[00:44:57] Ed McCann: My pleasure.