ROUND TABLE REVIEW 21
CHANGE CONTROL Lucy Craig of Mace welcomed the focus on change control in the new regime, as adding “certain elements later than Stage 4 causes horrendous issues”
smoke control systems) later than Stage 4 “causes horrendous change and spatial fit issues.” However she suggested that including relevant product information earlier in projects came with its own set of issues, and was “a bit of a dark art, you have to go to some suppliers’ offices to get access to their Declarations of Performance.” Glyn Hauser, of round table sponsor JELD-WEN, said the firm is promoting third party performance certification, which isn’t required in Building Regulations; and with so many potential combinations of products possible, he believed “independent expertise” was essential to achieve credibility. Chris Hall agreed that there were major challenges around testing, and it could be a matter of “interpretation;” he added that with engineers reluctant to take responsibility for a specification, manufacturers “find themselves doing design. But we shouldn’t be able to recommend a product if we have concerns about how it works.” Richard Harrison offered the view that because of the amount of detail required, “manufacturers are designers, anyone that makes a decision is a designer.”
On the potential of standardising elements, Lucy Craig said “we live in a bit of a bespoke world, and some of those questions aren’t asked until later on in projects,” but a standardised “suite of products” would probably be a better alternative, “but you might not satisfy the brief.” She added that such packages would need
ADF MAY 2024
to be “collaboratively recognised.” Peter Sutcliffe said that in the interest of circumventing the vast volumes of info in the Golden Thread, specifying “standard assemblies” could work, if done pre- Gateway 2, “to get everybody comfortable.”
Stephen Hamil of NBS posed the key question as to whether more prescriptive specifications would be seen, as we moved from ‘tender specs’ to ‘record specs’ in the new regime. He also asked how revisions to specifications would be managed and approved, and whether product substitution happen less. Sutcliffe said that early specification of ‘assemblies’ could see the end of ‘specification-switching’ to inferior (and often negligibly cheaper) solutions, justified on ‘value engineering’ grounds. He said: “If I could consign the good old ‘equal or approved’ clause to the dustbin, I’d be really pleased.” Under the Golden Thread, it would be a case of: “If you want to change something, fine, but we’re not taking responsibility for it, and that would send everybody to the hills.” He asserted: “It is easy to write that into a contract.”
He admitted that the openness of data required would challenge the whole supply chain, but asserted: “We all need to share the information, about the product assemblies and testing and everything else; it needs to be openly available, so that we all understand what we are putting into the design, and what we’re pricing.”
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