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Scott is our Timber Engineering Manger. He joined Carpenter Oak & Woodland in 2004 primarily because of his love of working with wood, and having managed both our framing yards, he took up the challenge of developing our rapidly growing Timber Engineering business in 2006. Scott, (being much older than he actualy looks!) has many years experience in the construction industry as a Quantity Surveyor and Contracts Manager, and brings us a great depth of knowledge from having managed a number of different construction businesses.
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I was disturbed by reading Stewart Brand’s comments in his book “How Buildings Learn” about construction costs getting “corrupt” when talking about late design modifications, contractors billing “punitively”, using words like “its a racket” and “disgraceful”. Rightly or wrongly if this is the attitude of the Client or Architect on a construction project, how do we tackle this perception? The answer is, of course, don’t change the design half way through a job which then involves a redraw, ordering small quantities of materials, changes to work already built, the disruption to work schedules and the momentum of the design and build process.
I got to thinking about how it applies to our way of working and why we have so few changes and why this is rarely an issue. The answer is early stage design involvement – if we are doing the design, then we do it our way and the Client gets early stage cost certainty and advantage. It is only where a job is “fully designed” by professionals inexperienced in heavy timber framing before going out to competitive tender that the problems start. The competitors have to produce the cheapest price in order to win the job, in other words the person who allows the least, but still in compliance with the contract documents, will win the job, and then has to go back after the contract is let and tell the design team where all the essential bits have been missed out. Where we and our Clients win is they get us on board early in the design stage so everything is included from day 1. Anything we miss out is our problem!
I remembered an example only just the other day where the engineer had allowed a stress value for a specialist designed curved glulam beam using 11mm thick laminations. Because we weren’t on board at that stage of the design, he used a stress value that wasn’t correct. When we were appointed and became aware of the value used (it wasn’t part of the tendering information), we pointed out his mistake and gave him the correct value. He couldn’t make the beam design work. He asked us how to reslove the issue and we told him we could regrade the timber to a higher stress level and solve the problem, but there would be an extra cost involved. He couldn’t understand why.
The answer is simple and one we constantly preach, get us involved at an early stage of the design process and we will give you early stage cost certainty and avoid late project cost surprises, and these “cost surprises” are not “corrupt” or “disgraceful”, but the consequence of poor procurement practices.
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