Egan Report - Has the Construction Industry Met Its Goals?
Egan Report - Has the construction industry met its goals?
This essay is written in particular reference to the emerging use of BIM software solutions.
Sir John Egan made several remarks based on the findings of his original report in 1998 and the progress of the construction industry in the 10 years since in his 2008 address. The purpose of this essay is to look at some of the main points raised by Egan in his 2008 address and evaluate their relevance with regard to the structure and practices of the modern UK construction industry.
Egan made the suggestion that “you design the whole project on a computer versus a target that you are trying to achieve” (Egan, 2008). In stating this Egan was referring to his past experience in the car industry where new vehicles are designed on computer long before and tooling takes place for manufacture. His suggestion of applying this principle to the construction industry is in the main a valid hypothesis and has in many ways been acted upon to a certain degree.
The use of Building Information Modelling as a project management tool is already being implemented in many areas of construction and will continue to grow in the UK as the “government will require fully collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) as a minimum by 2016.” (Cabinet Office, 2011)
This enables full costing and process information to be predicted and calculated long before any construction work takes place on the project, which satisfies the requirement Egan placed on the industry for pre-planning the production processes as well as helping to reduce the supply chain costs by providing accurate information to tender against as opposed to the lowest cost tendering that was based on an idea rather than a design.
Egan (2008) suggests that the government are not trying to be a good client as they have been wasting resources by using lowest cost tendering. (Finch, 2011) says that
This essay is written in particular reference to the emerging use of BIM software solutions.
Sir John Egan made several remarks based on the findings of his original report in 1998 and the progress of the construction industry in the 10 years since in his 2008 address. The purpose of this essay is to look at some of the main points raised by Egan in his 2008 address and evaluate their relevance with regard to the structure and practices of the modern UK construction industry.
Egan made the suggestion that “you design the whole project on a computer versus a target that you are trying to achieve” (Egan, 2008). In stating this Egan was referring to his past experience in the car industry where new vehicles are designed on computer long before and tooling takes place for manufacture. His suggestion of applying this principle to the construction industry is in the main a valid hypothesis and has in many ways been acted upon to a certain degree.
The use of Building Information Modelling as a project management tool is already being implemented in many areas of construction and will continue to grow in the UK as the “government will require fully collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) as a minimum by 2016.” (Cabinet Office, 2011)
This enables full costing and process information to be predicted and calculated long before any construction work takes place on the project, which satisfies the requirement Egan placed on the industry for pre-planning the production processes as well as helping to reduce the supply chain costs by providing accurate information to tender against as opposed to the lowest cost tendering that was based on an idea rather than a design.
Egan (2008) suggests that the government are not trying to be a good client as they have been wasting resources by using lowest cost tendering. (Finch, 2011) says that
Bibliography: Brook, M., 2004. Estimating and Tendering for Construction Work. 3rd ed. Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann. Cabinet Office, 2011. Government Construction Strategy. [Online] Available at: www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/Government-Construction-Strategy.pdf Egan, S. J., 2008. Egan: I’d give construction about. [Online] Available at: http://www.bre.co.uk/filelibrary/pdf/clip/sirjohnegan21-05-08.pdf Finch, R., 2011. NBS Guide to Tendering: for construction projects. 1st ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: NBS Publications. Joint Research Centre, 2012. Eurocodes: Building the future. [Online] Available at: http://eurocodes.jrc.ec.europa.eu/home.php Philp, D., 2012. Cabinet Office, BIM and the UK Construction Strategy. [Online] Available at: http://www.thenbs.com/topics/bim/articles/bimAndTheUKConstructionStrategy.asp