End of year review 2021!

Crikey, 2021 has flown by…..

In last year’s End of Year message, I noted that in the words of Vinnie Jones, 2020 had been “Emotional”. I’m not sure if I can find an appropriate adjective for 2021…. Roller Coaster, maybe?!

Anyway, In line with our ethos of supporting organisations to become more efficient, effective and resilient, we started the year by publishing our Supply Chain Efficiencies Insight Report which set out to identify and demonstrate some of the inefficiency metrics – the ‘stuff’ that’s wasted on not making the actual MMC product – within the MMC supply chain, which was well received and I even spotted some healthy plagiarism of our report, which I will take as a compliment.

Aside from the fact we would have liked to expand on some of our research themes and put out more market insights like many businesses this year, we have focused upon our key public and private sector clients including RPs, Tier 1s, leading MMC suppliers and local authorities.

Despite the challenges we all continue to face with the global ‘you know what’, Public sector contracts have continued to bear fruit this year, recently enhanced by the ‘official’ recognition of the “MMC Advisor” role by the RIBA in the recently released DfMA Overlay Guide 2020.

It has certainly been of benefit with recent contract wins easing the appointment process. We have also continued to cement our position as leading advisors in the space this year with several direct engagements as MMC Strategy advisors, where we are successfully deploying our holistic (Beyond MMC) approach that blends a healthy dose of straight talking market reality, encourages the capture of tangible data (evidence) to inform decision making, with the more academic to truly address the challenges facing our clients.

With regards to general comments about the direction of travel of the MMC sector, momentum appears mixed with pockets of success, good intention and directional focus, but I am yet to be convinced that some of the recent government initiatives are filtering through at the scale need to make a major impact.

Whilst we applaud the intent behind initiatives, such as the Construction Playbook and the Construction Innovation Hub's Value Toolkit, these future looking outputs still need to be ‘translated’ into the currently traditional procurement approaches and frameworks. This view was reinforced by a recent research project we undertook for a leading tier 1 contractor client, the task, to pick through the 'noise' surrounding MMC and get to the nub of the current market realities. We assessed 49 public sector tenders between 2019 and April 2021 for reference either directly or indirectly to MMC, you may be surprised to hear that only 34% (16) had any kind of direct or indirect reference to MMC, with only 9 of those directly using the words MMC and don’t even get me started on the quality of those questions – “insert generic MMC experience here”- “describe how you would use MMC on this scheme”…….. urgh!

(Note the above 16% is was taken from a snapshot of 49 'residential' tenders reviewed and does not necessarily give a picture of the wider market)

Whilst I openly acknowledge that we are on a journey and we are still, despite the continued noise and external pressures, in the early stages. We, the team, have always maintained that real change comes via either competitive advantage or legislation, which is where we are seeing tangible momentum for MMC solutions via the introduction of mandatory Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) requirements, a continued and ever growing focus on de-carbonization and net-zero targets and the increasing use of Pre-manufactured Value (PMV) targets in tenders, which will lead people to MMC, although currently actually working out the latter with any consistency appears to be a bit of a dark art.

Maybe the much-needed next industry step change will come from the various global 'Giga projects’ with scale, budget and unparalleled ambition. It will certainly be interesting to see if the global supply chain is up to the task, certainly the goals and volume alone could lead to some interesting applications of tech and solutions (however, clearly scale and ambition isn't a guaranteed reason for success, just look at what happened to Kattera). One to watch though for sure.

2021 also saw us re-brand from BD Solutions to ‘Better Delivery’, we really enjoyed working with Max Farrell of the LDN Collective to re-position ourselves and better articulate what we are about, we also got some incredible art work and bold new look produced by Andy Spicer .

We produced our mantra ‘Beyond MMC' that captures our thoughts on how we can unlock new ways of working by focusing on the '9 Pillars of MMC' which we launched earlier in the year at the excellent Movers and Shakers event that I hosted, with guest speakers including Tom Bloxham, who delivered a fantastic and engaging key note speech, alongside panelists Edward Jezeph and Deborah Vogwell of Homes England, Matt Warren of Lendlease and Tara Gbolade of Gbolade design. Link to watch event recording here.

At Better Delivery we have always believed in the power of collective thinking to solve complex issues, whilst we have been operating an innovative collective model for a number of years, 2022 will see us doing more to promote the work we have been delivering alongside this fantastic group of carefully selected, industry leading, individuals and organizations, in their respective fields, that we now call 'Better Delivery Collective', watch this space for an announcement about a major project we delivered with one of our partners and case studies in the new year.

Alongside our valued existing clients, we’ve also been fortunate enough to work with some fascinating new clients this year. Ultrapanel being a highlight, genuinely innovative roofing solution bringing so much added value to the market with a remarkably sophisticated whole life approach that delivers a versatile and simple end product.

Our increasingly international clients have included ARaymond, a 1.2Bn Euro Turnover, seventh generation, privately owned company, who are bringing their leading expertise as manufacturers of complex, technically advanced connection interface solutions (security coded electromagnetic interface connectors anyone?) into the offsite space, we have supported them in mapping the offsite market in the UK and identifying ‘pain points’ in the MMC market that they could create solutions for, via deploying some of their team of 300 in-house engineers and annual R&D budget of circa 6% of their annual turnover. We have learnt as much from them as they have from us! Definitely a ‘watch this space’ situation.

Finally, Last year’s I gave some predictions:

• Increase in affordable housing starts
• Planning relaxations
• Potential Increase in social rent (BTR) schemes
• More remote working, less commuting, less office space requirements
• Increase in vertically integrated delivery models
• Far higher uptake of offsite manufactured elements/solutions
• Less labor-intensive activities on sites
• A move to more UK based component production
• Increased uptake of technology and BIM integration

These appeared to have been reasonably accurate with the exception that Tier 1 players appear to be becoming less reactionary and more measured in understanding and taking stock of the actual state of the MMC market. Our work in this space has brought some robust, metric based and rather surprising market realities to inform their Strategies.

Where do we go from here? well assuming that the walls of the economy don’t come crashing down anytime soon given the seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns, I think the momentum will continue to build if a little slowly for our liking with next year’s core focus areas being as follows:

• Increase in considered and affordable ‘true net-zero’ solutions coming to market
• Focus on Government contracts
• Greater focus on Retro-fit over new build residential
• Strong reaction to building safety act, opportunity for innovative solutions to support owners in meeting their obligations
• PMV Targets will continue to focus the tendering and delivery, but require more clarity to enable consistency across the sector

That's it from me this year, have a great break one and all, don't let the external situation take away your spirit and come back refreshed and ready for whatever 2022 will bring!