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EGAN: SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS MADE BUT MORE WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE Overall conclusion of 10th anniversary survey into the impact of the report by Sir John Egan into how the construction industry could improve performance. 25 June 2008 The UK construction industry has responded well in some fields but still has much work to do in other key areas if it is to match the ideal of the highly-efficient, modern, sustainable construction industry visualised in the report authored by Sir John Egan 10 years ago into how the construction industry could significantly improve its performance. This is the overall conclusion of a survey published today by BIW Technologies, a leading UK-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to the property/construction sector. Highlights: - 55% thought that significant progress had been made on implementing Egan's overall recommendations
- most progress has been in 'process improvement' and least in 'costs and defects'
- clients were identified as the leaders in driving positive change while government bodies were named as the laggards
- report's main benefit: stressed need for collaboration; main negative: heightened idea that projects could be completed cheaply
- sustainability concerns and ICT advances were identified as key in promoting further change to address Egan's recommendations
- UK construction industry was ranked behind the US and Japan but ahead of Spain and Italy against Egan's benchmark areas
The telephone survey carried out in late May and early June 2008, covered over 200 senior construction industry managers, property analysts, property and construction journalists, and industry body and government representatives. The Rethinking Construction report produced by Sir John Egan's Construction Task Force was commissioned by the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, and was published in July 1998. The central aim of the report was to raise standards in the UK construction industry by identifying areas that needed improvement and putting forward best practice recommendations, which the industry and its clients could collectively adopt to improve performance. Overall 55% thought that 'significant progress' had been made in addressing the main improvement areas identified by the Egan report, while 25% thought that not enough progress had been made, with the remainder having no firm opinion. The main benefit of the report (identified by 74% of respondents) was its emphasis on the need for greater collaborative working across the industry; the main negative (61%) was said to be that the report had heightened the perception that projects could be built more cheaply than was actually possible. The Egan report focused on five main areas – need to modernize, drivers of change, costs and defects, process improvement, and enabling improvement. Some 72% of respondents thought that most progress had been made in 'process improvement’, while over 62% thought that the area where least progress had been made was in 'costs and defects’. Only 35% thought that the industry had done enough to satisfy the Egan report’s call for a 'need to modernise'. Clients were identified as the main leaders in driving positive change, followed by industry bodies, design/consultant teams, contractors/sub contractors and suppliers. Government bodies were blamed as the main laggards and criticised for talking too much about the issues, producing a wide array of documents, but not taking enough decisive action. Specifically with regard to driving more collaborative working in the construction industry, recommended by the Egan report, 52% of respondents thought that a greater use of ICT collaborative platforms offered the best opportunity to improve performance in this area, while a further 25% identified a greater use of collaborative contracts as being important. When asked which factors were influencing change in their firms in line with Egan’s recommendations, 41% said sustainability concerns, 30% said ICT advances, and 22% said improving skills. In terms of what the Government could do that would be most helpful, most (60%) thought that existing legislation or commitments should be enforced more strongly, rather than more new laws passed. For example, there was a general view that there needs to be far better monitoring of the Government's new Sustainable Construction strategy and that public bodies should show more commitment to it. For the future, the majority of respondents thought that the greatest need was to: better measure process improvements by, for example, adopting an emissions report, more strongly embrace ICT as a method of promoting collaborative working and improve sustainability practices and safety in the workplace. When asked to rank the UK construction industry against its international peers, the majority of respondents placed the UK industry behind the US and Japan, and North European countries such as Germany, but ahead of Southern European countries such as Italy and Spain. Colin Smith, CEO of BIW Technologies, commented: “The UK construction industry has clearly made advances over the past ten years towards meeting the necessary improvements highlighted by the Egan report, but clearly further work needs to be done. It’s encouraging that the trend towards more collaborative working in the industry, a key area identified by Egan, is gathering pace, with ICT at the forefront of this shift. And I hope that if an industry panel to review the Egan report is established under Andrew Wolstenholme, the role of ICT is more explicitly recognised and endorsed. Certainly we are very keen to do all we can to help to make the UK construction sector among the most efficient, sustainable and competitive globally.”
For further information, please contact:
- Paul Wilkinson, BIW head of corporate communications – 01483 712620 or mobile 07788 445920, email paul.wilkinson@biwtech.com
- Richard Evans/Kit Bingham – The Communication Group – 0207 630 1411
Notes to editors: BIW - Project control and collaboration services from BIW Technologies (www.biwtech.com) were first employed in 1999 on UK construction projects for Sainsbury’s. BIW believes it is the European leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration systems for the construction and property industry, measured by number of users, with over 105,000 users from some 10,500 different organisations.
- The BIW platform is a sophisticated supply chain integration system, designed specifically for construction projects or programmes. Each client is provided with a unique, project or programme-specific environment created around a knowledge database. With this, information can be made available securely via a standard web browser to every team member – from the earliest concepts, through detailed design, buildability studies, pre-fabrication, construction, maintenance, operation and improvement to the eventual demolition or dismantling of the facility.
- BIW customers include Cambridge University, Sainsbury’s, House of Fraser, Crest Nicholson, Marks & Spencer, the Coal Authority, Hertfordshire County Council, Mace, Bovis Lend Lease, Interserve, Gleeds, Fitzpatrick, and developers Nakheel, Argent, Land Securities, Ballymore, Dandara and British Land.
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