Constructing Excellence

Constructing Excellence is a UK-based construction industry membership organisation. In the UK, it is unique insofar as its member organisations are drawn from across the industry supply chain, ranging from clients, through contractors and consultants, to suppliers and manufacturers of building materials and components. Created in 2003, Constructing Excellence leads efforts to apply the progressive thinking of the 1994 Latham^[1] and 1998 Egan Reports,^[2] having absorbed several of the bodies established since those government-instigated reports were published.

Origins

Constructing Excellence was the result of the convergence and merger of several related industry initiatives.

Following the recommendations of the Latham Report, the Construction Industry Board was established to oversee industry reform, including the application of partnering by construction project teams. In parallel, industry reform group, the Reading Construction Forum, was developing guidance on partnering in construction,^[3] and the Construction Best Practice Programme (CBPP, and its sister programme, IT Construction Best Practice, ITCBP) was created to provide guidance and advice to UK construction and client organisations wanting to gain the knowledge and skills required to implement change. The Design Build Foundation (DBF) was launched in 1997 as a catalyst for change, drawing together forward-thinking construction industry customers, designers, contractors, consultants, specialists and manufacturers, representing the whole construction supply chain.

Following the Egan Report, Re-thinking construction, Movement for Innovation (M4I) and the Confederation of Construction Clients were formed, along with focused sector groups: the Housing Forum, the Local Government Task Force and the Government Construction Clients Panel.

This profusion of groups proved unwieldy, and during the early years of the 21st century, several mergers took place. In 2002, the DBF and Reading Construction Forum merged to form a new supply chain body, Collaborating for the Built Environment, known as Be. In 2003, M4I and the Construction Best Practice Programme merged to form Constructing Excellence, and in 2005, Constructing Excellence and Be merged.

Activities

As well as continuing the demonstration project and best practice work started by the Construction Best Practice Programme and M4I, Constructing Excellence has produced several notable industry reports, including Be Valuable, an assessment of life-time cost approaches such as 1:5:200, written by Richard Saxon and published in 2005, and the Wolstenholme Report (Never Waste a Good Crisis), written by Andrew Wolstenholme and published in 2009, which reviewed progress since the 1998 Egan Report and made further recommendations to the industry. Also in 2009, Constructing Excellence, jointly with the JCT, launched the JCT Constructing Excellence collaborative contract (originally the Be Collaborative Contract).

It also undertakes UK government consultancy work, including compilation (with BRE) of the industry's annual Key Performance Indicators (included in the ONS's Construction Statistics Annual).

Constructing Excellence provides administrative support to the Construction Clients' Group (formerly the Confederation of Construction Clients) and, where appropriate, works in partnership with the pan-industry government liaison body, the Strategic Forum for Construction.

In August 2007, Constructing Excellence took on the management of the Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers. The NCCTP members include: 4Projects, Causeway Technologies, Business Collaborator (today UNIT4 Collaboration Software) and Sarcophagus.

See also

• Society of Construction Arbitrators

References

1. ^ Latham, M. (1994), Constructing the Team, London: HMSO.
2. ^ Egan, J. (1998) Rethinking Construction: Report of the Construction Task Force, London: HMSO.
3. ^ for example, Bennett, J. and Jayes, S. (1995) Trusting the Team, Reading: Centre for Strategic Studies in Construction, The University of Reading, with the partnering task force of the Reading Construction Forum.

External links

• Constructing Excellence (website)