Crown Commercial Service deep dive into Offsite Framework with industry

Kumar Kairamkonda, Category Lead from the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) shared their experience at our Innovation Day on Monday 30th January.

The CCS was glad to be part of the Innovation Day organised by the Hub. The collaboration workshops such as this are seen as key to taking the construction industry in the same direction. The workshops provided some specific feedback on the CCS frameworks.

Three important takeaways for us are:

1.

Closer collaboration of all stakeholders within the industry is equally important. We had academics, clients and contractors on our table and each of them had a unique perspective about issues with current frameworks. Their comments were insightful and valuable. Academics were more aware of standards and initiative in other countries, suppliers wanted equal opportunity to be able to innovate and clients had to deliver value for money by being within its bounds. Some radical proposals included getting rid of frameworks, distributing work equally or suppliers publishing catalogues of parts which are compatible and an Integrator can bring all parts together.

All these perspectives and further market engagement activities feed into our Category Strategies. We need to be more agile and our frameworks need to adapt to support the industry by creating an optimum balance between expectations from clients, supporting suppliers and encouraging further research.

2.

It was clear that the construction industry is becoming more agile and data driven. There was consensus on the table to be able to gather intelligent data which would enable better decision making. Use of modern tools like AI could also help analyse this data. CCS currently collects various metrics at framework level. We are working in this direction by being part of the Government Construction Metrics Working Group and looking to incorporate uniform metrics across all our frameworks. Further collaboration activities are also required at Supplier level to create uniformity in collecting and sharing data.

3.

Provision of Pipeline and early supplier engagement was also a key discussion point. Clients by being proactive and publishing pipeline in advance helps suppliers plan for the future. Early market engagement by the clients is necessary and we encourage our clients for the same through our frameworks. CCS are increasingly organising more supplier and client early engagement sessions every year and publish pipeline information as soon as this is available through our clients.