Modern Methods of Construction

The Sir John Egan report of 1998 showed that construction labour had only 40% to 60% efficiency about 10% 0f materials were wasted and 30% of construction required rework. The industry has made progress since then in seeking change and the Government has been supporting several industry initiatives.

In order to move forward even further the construction and development industries need to make radical changes to the way projects are designed procured and delivered.

More efficient construction methods can increase the speed and efficiency of development and achieve higher quality and better standards of what is built. They can also offer resource efficiency by reducing waste, increase productivity and improve health and safety to increase the supply of environmentally sustainable and well designed development.

Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) is the term used to embrace a range of technologies and processes involving various forms of supply chain specifications, prefabrication and off-site assembly. MMC makes use of more efficient materials, speeds up delivery, enables high standards of design quality and can help to reduce resource consumption.

Not all development is suited to MMC but Government initiatives are increasingly geared to provide support to developments which are seen to promote its use.

Here at Portland Consulting Engineers we have a resource which is mature, experienced and motivated to give clients the advice required to meet the challenges required to embrace MMC. Our managing director John Hardy has spent some 40 years in the industry and has been involved in the design, construction and repair of many forms of system built structures.

As an organisation we embrace the MMC challenges placed upon our clients and can assist them and their other project professionals and partners to debate, evaluate and choose appropriate forms of construction for a particular project.

The use of MMC must be appropriate to the particular development and should be seen to achieve long term adaptability to change and stability in terms of the original substantial investment. Considerable amounts of system built construction post war failed to achieve this and there are lessons to be learnt and not repeated in modern forms of MMC.