Construction sites supply chain

The context for this book is large UK construction sites (over 15 million in value) operated by large main contractors (found within the top 30 contractors in terms of annual work won by value in the UK), rather than those operated by small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) or micro operations and sole traders. However, smaller industry organisations inevitably participate in work on large sites as they operate as subcontractors within industry supply chains. Research has shown that subcontractors take their ideas of safety with them when they move from project to project (Aboagye-Nimo eta/. 2012), and therefore SMEs and even micro-SMEs play a considerable part in helping to create and perpetuate what safety is on large construction sites. 

Yet it cannot be assumed that any particular safety will cascade down the management and supply chains to the sites and then manifest, unchanged, as safety in practice. In fact, it is very unlikely that this is ever the case - the establishment of safety in the office does not necessitate its emergence on our sites. A better understanding of the complexities and incoherence of safety within the site environment is needed, and the rest of this book now seeks to explore safety on sites through the shared understandings of those who work on sites every day. Rather than measure policy or evaluate management systems, exploration is made of actual practice, and how people consider and position safety within their lived realities of the construction site environment. 

Safety on construction sites operates within two distinct contexts. Firstly, the wider processes of the construction industry arguably create an environment in which safety struggles to survive. The constant pressures for production, as time and money are prioritised through the practices of lowest cost tendering and ever-squeezed margins along protracted and convoluted supply chains, are highly influential and can be readily identified as fundamental truths of construction site life. On sites, the presence and inevitability of... 

One measure of competition is response time or speed of response. Blackburn [6] and Stalk [86] describe firms that compete on delivery speed. One example is Atlas Door, an industrial door company that coordinated its supply chain to offer custom door delivery (for reactors or furnaces) within two weeks, when the industry standard was over four months. Atlas performed at this level by coordinating order quotation and scheduling production, excess capacity, and tools, synchronizing all components so that a complete kit was delivered to the construction site. Atlas s market share increased rapidly to 80% of the industry volume within five years, with a 15% price premium. 

Construction sites are open systems, which are affected by factors that very often are not controllable (e.g. supply chains) and even not predictable (e.g. weather). 

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