Watch: Professor John Dyson's inaugural lecture at the University of Birmingham – 'In search of treasure and redemption'

Finally, we offered options for strategic direction for improvement, combined with comprehensive and highly detailed potential improvements (using the 5S method).

Johnston recalls a bathroom pod project early in his own career, where the beautifully designed, millimetre-perfect pods had to be inserted into a traditionally built building.. Aiming for efficiency in such modular projects carries risk..He says that far too much time was spent fixing the gaps between the manufactured and traditional parts.

Whilst the insides of the pods were identical, the outside utility connections were different every single time.Johnston warns of the knock-on effects of these types of scenarios, where a lack of advanced planning results in a total loss of the intended value.. Marks agrees and says the solution lies in bringing the construction site build portion of projects up to the same accuracy as the modules.. Modular construction.Bringing up the B2 Atlantic Yards project, Amy Marks explains that the problems caused by the module frames not being reset when needed is an easily fixable issue to learn from, not a reason to write off prefab altogether.. For example, lessons learned from the earlier Victoria Hall project in Wolverhampton (which saw tolerance issues between the modules and core structure of the building), did inspire a shift from concrete to structural steel frames on Atlantic Yards.. Further, while she believes it’s possible to achieve tolerances, she says that not every process (ie.

every contract, every scope, every specification) is currently set up for accurate tolerances.This needs to change, she says, or what we’re aiming to do will be nearly impossible.. “You can't have the same behaviour and think you're going to have some dramatically different result (that's going to be great) all of a sudden.’.

The reality is that making these changes offers a solution to many of the problems we’re facing as an industry at the moment, including poor productivity, low value, excessive amounts of waste, and carbon emissions.

We need to find a way to facilitate this shift to industrialised construction because almost nothing is coming out in the way we intended it, Marks says, particularly in terms of cost, certainty, and schedule..Countries and companies are sensitive about where their data is stored and the implications of having it stolen or data flows disrupted.

The UK and US are reducing regulations to stay competitive in the market, whereas the EU is maintaining a high regulatory stance, and, as such, this market seems to be stagnating.. How does all this impact project development?.10 to 15 years ago, when average cab density was still well below 10kW per cab, proximity to fibre network was the key indicator for site viability.

However, the expansion of fibre networks and reduced latency criticality associated with AI, has shifted the focus to power availability.Increased non-water-based cooling demands with an associated increase in power consumption is further driving most site acquisition conversations to focus on power, and lead time to power availability..