CASE STUDY 2 LAING O'ROURKE COMMITMENT TO DFMA AND NEW VOLUMETRIC FACTORY

Within the construction sector, market cyclicality and the pressure to efficiently match supply and demand are creating both significant challenges and substantial opportunities. Smarter processes pioneered in other industries, such as aerospace and automotive; are now being adopted by some pioneers in the UK construction industry.

Laing O'Rourke is rethinking the way they design, engineer, construct and operate their buildings and infrastructure. They believe that construction and engineering must break away from traditional processes to evolve and deliver projects quicker, safer and more sustainably; to a higher quality, with greater certainty.

Laing O'Rourke's Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approach redefines the traditional phases of project delivery; agreeing and locking down the design phase much earlier to allow the manufacturing, assembly, testing and commissioning phases to be compressed and run in parallel, rather than in one long linear sequence, driving greater efficiencies in how resources are mobilised.

DfMA is enabled through the investment Laing O'Rourke have made in digital engineering and in manufacturing facilities, anchored by Explore Industrial Park (EIP), Nottinghamshire, producing an often complex set of building system components in a controlled factory environment, prior to delivery to a construction site for installation.

Laing O'Rourke residential projects including Elephant Road, London benefitted from DfMA, with manufactured components shortening the delivery phase of the programme. The approach is being replicated on other live projects including Two Fifty One, Southwark. Laing O'Rourke's ambition is to build and operate a new Advanced Manufacturing Facility alongside the existing factory at EIP. The AMF will use intelligent design, precision engineering and fully automated processes to deliver a new range of automated residential solutions that could revolutionise house-building in the UK.

Explore Industrial Park, Nottinghamshire