Standardise to optimise

Standardised building design can make factories more flexible and reduce the time it takes to upgrade an existing facility or build a new one, adding real value to manufacturing businesses, writes building engineer Andrew Burrell.

The rate of technological and digital change in the industrial world is getting faster every day.

Greater customer demand for made‑to‑order products that can be bought and delivered anytime, anywhere, and expansion into new markets and locations, means smart businesses are already thinking about how to design and build new or more efficient and adaptable facilities.

What’s it all about?

Standardised design allows businesses to design and construct facilities that meet their specific needs, provides a baseline for future designs, reduces build time and frees up capital so that businesses can do more with it. Through standardised design, it’s possible to simplify procurement and enhance cost accuracy by knowing what works best.

The real benefit of this approach is the ability to build a new facility or adapt an existing one with speed, allowing businesses to respond as quickly as possible to customer demands; for today’s industrial clients, speed to market is everything.

It’s through Industry 4.0 that businesses can also collect and store building data better than ever before and use it to generate and analyse standardised designs to understand and identify how their entire portfolio could be optimised.

Think about tomorrow

Future expansion and flexibility can be included in standardised designs from the very start. We’re working with a logistics provider to develop a standard design for their new frozen foods facility. As part of our role, we’ve put together a technical design guide that includes vital information including how the facility works and strategies for future expansion and development. This means that as their business expands, their facilities will be able to grow quickly and easily without disruption.

Enhance opportunities

Vital process, operational and business data can be gathered and fed into standardised designs throughout the project life cycle; it’s through Industry 4.0 that these processes are being made possible.

By utilising this information, it’s possible to create optimised facilities for both current operations and future developments or expansions, and identify what needs to be maintained such as the size of a facility, and what needs to be improved such as ventilation, to create designs that bring the most benefits.

By looking at what already works well for one of our industrial clients — and where things could be improved — we’ve found them suitable sites more quickly and have completed early stage facility design work 20–25 per cent faster than usual. This has helped them meet challenging sales deadlines which wouldn’t have been possible using a more traditional design approach.

Turn to tech

To realise the full benefits of standardised design, the use of technology is also important. We’ve developed a simple-to-use, excel‑based tool kit for a client that allows us to feed in design specifications such as the height and size of their buildings, to produce concept designs and accurate cost estimates in minutes, saving the client money and time spent on early design and business planning, all at the click of a button.

People power

Standardised design can optimise facilities and make them more fit for the future, but this ultimately depends on people’s understanding of the benefits it can bring. In the long term, buy-in and uptake across a business is needed to produce buildings that really work for a business into the future.

Four-lever approach to optimise building design

We’ve developed a building model that shows ways to save money and time when designing buildings; building standardisation is one of them.

We use the model to help clients as much or as little as they need, from looking at how their business and processes work to developing strategies to enhance procurement.

On one project we’ve used the approach to reduce early stage design time by 35 per cent, saved the client 20 per cent in construction costs and improved cost accuracy by 20 per cent.

Applying all stages of our approach to a project will bring the greatest results. However, applying them one by one to small-scale projects will also bring measurable improvements.