NEWS EXTRA
Elkins said. “They are Safety and Wellbeing, Modern Methods of Construction and Diversity and Inclusion. I think we have a huge responsibility for driving and improving the safety culture in our industry. The stats bear this out. This industry, construction, but actually merchanting and supply are nit brilliant and not everyone goes how in the same way they arrive very day. I genuinely think we have to do something about that.” Elkins said, however, that one thing that had definitely changed throughout the Covid pandemic is the way that, with the Construction Leadership Council and the BMF, the industry has come together with a single voice. “I think that’s hugely exciting, and hugely important. We don’t compete on safety, so why aren’t shouldn’t we share best practice and learning
as a real baptism of fire. “When I became managing director, I made sure that I joined organisations such as the BMF Young Merchants, a local business mentoring scheme and Fortis, the buying group, so that I surrounded myself with people who knew more than I did,” he said.
Prior to his appearance at the BMF Conference, Bence said that he approached five business leaders across the industry and asked them what their challenges were. “There are no surprises that the first one was staff and salaries. The retention of staff is tough at the moment. Wage inflation is crazy, it’s breaking pay structures all over the place and is probably unsustainable.”
That was followed closely by re-establishing relationships, both with suppliers and with clients. “Suppliers may have had it their own way over the past 18 months but where is that relationship now? Is it broken, can it be fixed if it is, is it better than it was? One thing is sure, suppliers and merchants need to work closely together. Likewise on the other side of the supply chain with merchants and their clients. Merchants have had it their own way for the past year and a half. Where is that relationship now? We need to engage with our customer base a lot more
on safety? Why aren’t we challenging each other about our operations, why aren’t we calling out the suppliers, customers and even the competition for getting safety wrong. It’s not about competing it’s about keeping people safe and raising standards. I think we have a huge responsibility to do that.” He said that customers’ needs and requirements are changing and that the industry has to respond to that. “They are asking us about how to save rime, to reduce materials install them more efficiently, work more sustainably. That is what our customers are asking us. The ‘right price, right product; right place’ is no longer good enough. Customers want to understand how to do things, they want information and as a collective industry that information is not readily available. We need to be a collective voice, a single
to ensure that we maintain our market share gains.” Purchasing is another big challenge, Bence said. “Price inflation is something we are used to in this industry but probably not as much as we have been experiencing in the last few months. What we aren’t used to is price deflation, but we might be experiencing that in a short while, and how will our stock control and purchasing teams deal with this? “Lastly, there is technology. Online clearly creates as much opportunity for the merchants who are ahead of the game as it does threat to those who are behind the curve. The rise in online trading of the last few months has been spectacular, but the question now is whether that is finally going to be the trigger that kickstarts our trade buying all their everyday building material online.” The national merchants Bence spoke to highlighted the issues of data and digitisation, net zero policies and wider collaboration are things that need to be kept on top of, along with skills and inclusion practices.
The big difference, as far as Bence could see, between nationals and independent merchants is that independents are focused on today, while the larger nationals are focussed on tomorrow, he said. BMJ
December 2021
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
voice not a fragmented voice, and we need to be asking about data, product innovation, carbon, waste,” he said. “That’s not something that is the responsibility of us at TP, nor is it of any single business in this room. It’s a collective thing that we all need to be doing in order to drive the agendas of net zero carbon, sustainability, efficiency reduction in waste, skills shortage.”
Elkins gave the example of the issue of single-use plastics in the industry. “How do we get rid of single use plastics in our industry? I can shout that as TP I don’t want bricks wrapped in single use plastic any longer, but that’s one voice. What we demonstrated through the BMF and the CLC is that the combined voice and a combined industry we can start to make real difference.”
He pointed out that the Government sees this industry as a
INDUSTRY FORUM
Andy Mitchell is chair of the Constructing leadership Council and took to the stage at the BMF Conference as part of the Industry Forum.
WHEN THE NOTIFICATION to work from home came through in early March 2020, Mitchell said that it quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t be a short-term thing and that the industry was in for a far more serious ride than anyone realised.
“As all the confusion and weirdness became clearer, it as apparent that the industry was in trouble”. Mitchell said he contacted a few key players in the industry and asked whether would they be up for “doing something” and that something became the CLC Taskforce. We agreed there were some things that we could do and that we should meet regularly. That meant daily for an hour at the beginning for as long as it took, which ended up being six months, though that has no changed to once a week”. There have now been over 160 meetings of the CLC Taskforce and it’s that level of commitment from across the industry that Mitchell believes has got us somewhere different. Mitchell said that the BMF CEO John Newcomb was on that first call and has been at pretty much every one of those 167 meetings, adding that Newcomb has been the clear and relentless voice of builders’ merchants across the land throughout this whole time. As the pandemic progressed, Mitchell said it became clear that the disparate parts of the industry that had come together had more in common than had been thought at first. It really doesn’t matter what part of the industry you’re in, you need three things, he said. “You need people, you need the flow of cash and you need the flow of materials. That is underlying all the effort and all the work that we are now putting in.” Mitchell also thanked the 70 or so BMF members who put a lot of time and information into the CLC Product Availability Group and producing regular updates statements that are now recognised by government, by (p10 F)
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huge driver in terms of delivering the low carbon agenda. “If you haven’t calculated your carbon footprint in your business then there are ways to do it and I would urge you to do so. We have 27million homes that need to be retrofitted to achieve zero carbon. We have a social housing sector that is now coming to people like us and asking questions like how can decarbonise me social housing network? In fact, they are now starting to ask the question about embedded carbon over the price of the materials that we supply them and that is going to move into the private and commercial residential markets soon.”
Elkins added: “It’s not just about doing the right thing, important though that is, there is a commercial imperative to do this as well. If we wait the risk is that someone else will come in and do it.” BMJ
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