About Us
C3 Systems was set up in 1998 to explore and exploit the issues
at the interface between construction and information technology -
both of which industries were moving and changing very quickly then,
as they are now.
Over the past thirty five years, the Company and its people have
made significant hands-on contributions to some of the largest and
most complex construction projects in the UK. We were involved in
North Sea platform projects like Murchison, Maureen and Tern where
many of today's most advanced construction project management
techniques and systems were developed. We helped translate these
methods to onshore construction and to implement them on the
Bluewater and the Oracle, Reading retail developments; and on the
Canary Wharf, Guillemont Park, Lion Plaza and GSK House commercial
office projects. We have worked with many of the key players in the
construction industry: Bechtel, Phillips Petroleum, Shell Expro,
Bovis, Heery, CPC, Mace and many others.
This experience has led to two key insights. First, although the
industry has spent huge sums of money on computing and
communications technologies over the past thirty years or so, this
has led to almost no substantial improvement in the way in which the
industry runs its projects. In particular, no significant advance
has been achieved in regard to the tools and techniques used to
manage projects at the production level, either in design offices or
on construction sites. As a result projects continue to overrun, and
firms continue to subsist, rather than thrive.
Consider one example. There was a time-it was a brief period-in
the sixties and seventies when the large general contractors did in
fact attempt to understand in detail how production took place on
site. In those days the main contractors self-performed almost all
of the work carried out on their projects. Relatively little work
was sub-contracted, so they employed large, diverse labour forces.
Basic wages were set within the framework of the relevant Working
Rule Agreement, but a large part of the worker's take home pay was
made up of output-based bonus payments. Initially, these were
calculated and administered largely on a rule of thumb basis by site
bonus clerks.
One of the first of all construction-specific computer
application areas was in the management of bonus payment schemes.
These schemes were based on the use of work study and other
operations research techniques for measuring effort and productivity
on site. The effort, in terms of manhours, required to carry out
almost any standard construction task was known in detail, for a
wide variety of working conditions. For large contractors with
thousands of employees it was obviously crucially important to be
able to calculate accurately and systematically the profitability of
different types of activity and of different projects. However, as
the main contractors disinvested from construction in the nineteen
seventies and eighties and specialist sub-contracting, particularly
labour-only subcontracting became the norm, this area of computing
came to an end. The labour-only subcontractors were generally very
much smaller companies which could afford to run their bonus systems
in the old fashioned, rule of thumb sort of way.
The result is that, today, no-one really knows precisely how much
effort is required to perform any given task on a construction site.
Of course, a good foremen knows how much his crew can erect in a day
and good schedulers know about optimum gang sizes, workface access
issues and so on. But, people really don't even try to think about
job sites as production environments; they are just places where
problems happen. And to repeat, as a result, projects remain
unpredictable, builders remain unprofitable.
The second observation drawn from over thirty years' experience,
largely at the interface between construction and computing, is that
the IT industry has greatly oversold this industry on complicated
so-called 'solutions' that don't in fact solve anything in the real
world. The real world of construction is a world of projects; large,
complex, transient enterprises which create and exchange huge
amounts of design and production information that's in a state of
continuous evolution and flux. The real challenge for IT in this
context is not for newer, better accounting, HR, or payroll systems;
it's for tools and techniques that help project teams to manage
these masses of project information more effectively.
C3 Systems (Construction Communications and Control Systems) was
set up specifically to create and promote the use of such systems.
Our Technical Document Management system -
TDM - is probably the best pure technical document
management package on the market. Our Production Management system -
Insight - enables the project team
to manage production information and thus to control production
processes with a precision and economy of effort never before
possible.
Insight was in a sense, a
precursor to BIM, Building Information Modelling. We see BIM as
being a truly transformational technology for construction over the
coming five to ten years. The analysis leading to this suggestion is
outlined in the main discussion paper, below.
Our software development partners are The Technology Forge; our
installation and technical support partners are Korscient / Standard
Platform.