Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/1157210
28 | SEPTEMBER 2019 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk The Knowledge Offsite manufacturing A s the industry comes under greater pressure to deliver more responsive and more complex in- vestment programmes, this is prompting many to review how they manage and deliver them. Given this, and the recent compli- ance and resilience issues raised in the media, AMP7 could be the tipping point – and a real opportunity for offsite manufacturing, with all the benefits it brings, to be widely adopted. There are many reasons why the water industry is well placed to go down the offsite manufacture route. Firstly, several sectors, including the construc- tion industry, have advanced their skillsets in offsite manufacturing. This gives the water industry plenty to draw on – it can capitalise on this knowl- edge and skill, adopting the key lessons and taking advantage of supply chains that have already been developed. There's the added impetus of Project 13 initiative (see page 10), which is seek- ing to boost productivity in UK infra- structure through increased engagement and adopting more enterprise thinking to delivery models. Offsite manufacture is ideal for repeat- able projects. Given the commonality of investment programmes to be found across the water industry, the opportunity for repeatability is clear, particularly if you consider assets in terms of assemblies and sub-assemblies or 'modules'. So the sector's projects are well-suit- ed to the opportunities offsite manufac- ture brings. However, to take advantage of these, there needs to be a greater appetite to approach solutions differ- ently. Procurement approaches need to be adapted so that they're more closely aligned with the supply chains already serving other markets in this manner. To see where the offsite approach is working well, companies would do well to look at the oil and gas market. The sector is particularly relevant to water and wastewater infrastructure as, within oil and gas, sub-assemblies are an underlying principle of asset build pro- grammes – you don't build an oil rig in situ, aŽer all. For those thinking that an oil rig is very different from a treatment plant, there are sectors closer to home deploy- ing offsite manufacturing to build treatment plants. For instance, food and beverage companies, where plant throughput is king, are under consider- able pressure to ensure their effluent treatment plants maintain compliance at all times. Like the wastewater sector, such food and drink sites are oŽen space constrained and they cannot afford downtime while plant is main- tained or upgraded. For a number of years, these compa- Has offsite manufacturing's moment arrived? Rich Matthews, managing director at Siltbuster Process Solutions, believes it is time for the water sector to reap the full benefits of design for manufacture & assembly