Highways England is reconsidering its procurement to encourage innovation and ultimately deliver more for less. Kristina Smith spoke to client, contractors and material suppliers to find out more. A group of senior managers is being addressed by a local resident who lives close to some proposed road works. The resident is angry, persistent and quite rude. The question is: how will these managers respond?
Improved efficiency of repairs will reduce overall effectiveness
Highways England is reconsidering its procurement to encourage innovation and ultimately deliver more for less. Kristina Smith spoke to client, contractors and material suppliers to find out more
A group of senior managers is being addressed by a local resident who lives close to some proposed road works. The resident is angry, persistent and quite rude. The question is: how will these managers respond?
The resident is, in fact, an actor. The behaviour of the managers is being assessed as part of a selection process for including their companies in a framework contract. Behavioural specialists are also looking at the characters and track records of individuals on a team, case studies, conducting interviews with team leaders and making visits to sites and offices.
8100 Highways England, the authority that looks after England’s motorways and major roads, believes that behaviour is so important that it gave behavioural assessments a weighting of 30% when it selected companies for its Collaborative Delivery Framework (CDF) in 2015. The theory is that by selecting designers, contractors and suppliers who behave in a certain way they will encourage collaboration, an essential ingredient if new ways of working are to be implemented.
This approach was borne out of the need for the public and private sector to deliver more for less following the economic downturn which began in late 2007. The incoming Highways England chief executive Jim O’Sullivan, who took up the post in June 2015, has also underlined the need to improve safety and the customer experience. Tony Turton, who heads up Highways England’s Smart Motorway capital programme, says that the agency could not go on delivering in the same way it had been doing. “We needed to deliver programmes rather than projects and that means all the partners and parties have to work together. Collaboration and behaviour is key to programme delivery.”
Smart Motorway Programme: innovation at work
• CAMERAS ON PLANT EQUIPMENT
Cameras on the arms of excavators when digging drainage trenches is improving safety and boosting operator efficiency.
• BARRIER REMOVAL
Steel barriers are usually manually unbolted from anchors and dismantled for moving. However, the process was made quicker and safer by using demolition equipment to snip the barriers and then an excavator to lift them out.
• PRECAST CENTRAL RESERVATION
Instead of traditional slipform barriers, precast central barriers are faster to install and lower risk in terms of quality.
• CONTINUOUS DUCTING
Ducts come in 6m lengths that require jointing and testing. But delivery partners are considering a continuous-roll ducting system.
• DYNAMIC ROADWORKS
To improve traffic flow when no workers are on site, work zone speed limits are lifted to between 88-96kph (55-60mph).
• JOURNEY TIME INFORMATION
By measuring speed of traffic flow and the distance to the next junction, journey time information and incident news is relayed to drivers.Turton and his colleagues at Highways England want to see members of the framework share best practice and lessons learned, develop new practices and technologies, exchange information about the best use of resources and plan together to get the most out of material and product suppliers.
Within the Collaborative Delivery Framework, doing things differently is encouraged. “When you share ideas, you can build on those ideas,” says Richard Stuart, programme director for2319 Costain, a major contractor. “You can build on each other’s learning and ideas.”
Costain won a place on one of four lots which make up the Collaborative Delivery Framework, which covers projects between €116-522 million (£100-450 million/$124-557 million). There are three more lots, two for smaller contract values and one for designers (see box on page 30).
To date the framework has been used to award around €4.06 billion (£3.5 billion / $4.33 billion) worth of projects, including several major upgrades under the Smart Motorways programme, and the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon major improvement scheme.
Stuart has just finished a period of secondment to Highways England’s delivery team for the Smart Motorways programme, overseeing design and delivery of those projects. He says there is a difference in the way contractors working on the 10 different Smart Motorways projects interact with each other.
“There are more direct relationships and communication. A few years ago that would not have happened,” he says. “Particularly on Smart Motorways, there’s a real community that transcends individual organisations. There is still a long way to go, but at the end of the day, it’s in all our interests to make it a real success story.”
Stuart points out that this collaborative spirit has not developed overnight. The change process started with the predecessors to the Collaborative Delivery Framework, the Major Projects and Managed Motorway frameworks.
“It’s something we have been building up to,” says Stuart. The Major Projects Framework, which was let in 2010, saw delivery partners coming together with Highways England to work collaboratively with an eye on the overall programme rather than individual projects.
"Collaboration is founded on relationships, and relationships tend to build. Those first five years saw a lot of relationship building and formed the foundation for the Collaborative Delivery Framework.”
Framework members will be measured on their behaviour and ability to collaborate, although when World Highways spoke to Highways England, the agency was still developing key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure these aspects. Any problems are also aired at a bi-monthly meeting of senior leaders from all the firms, the Collaborative Transformation Steering Group.
“We look at how we work together, what’s working and what’s not working, defects that are coming up and how we get over them. And how we engage with [supplier] tiers two, three, four,” says Turton. “In many organisations difficult conversations are avoided. What we need to do is change the way we are working together to change the industry.”
The real measure of success will be whether works can be delivered more efficiently. Highways England has set itself some challenging goals: to reduce delivery time each year, by half, half again, a quarter and then a further quarter; to reduce cost by 4% year on year. Turton has already seen the benefits of collaborative behaviour during the previous capital spending period, when he delivered 20% savings on the capital works programme he oversaw. “Behaviour and collaboration were not the whole reason for it, but they were key ingredients. And the same people delivering those schemes are delivering CDF.”
When it comes to using products or systems that are new to Highways England, there are cases where the collaborative approach is working well. One example is the use of a geogrid-reinforced pavement on the M3 motorway between junctions 2 and 4a. This allows for a thinner depth of pavement to be inlaid, saving time and cost with less disruption to road users.
Balfour Beatty, the main contractor on this section of motorway, is working on one of the Smart Motorway packages (see box above). Initially, the plan had been to carry out deep inlay works on the hard shoulder and the fast lane, milling the existing asphalt down to a lean-mix concrete base and laying a 360mm inlay in four lifts. However, the scope of work changed when Highways England added an aspiration: a longer maintenance-free period after the works so that travellers were spared further disruption for longer. This new requirement presented a challenge. “One of the constraints was that we had to maintain all the lanes running through the day,” explains Phil Greenin, operations manager for Tarmac, the asphalt supplier. “It would not have been possible to do that with that depth of lift and the curing time required.”
The solution came through collaboration between1146 Balfour Beatty, 2399 Tarmac, Highways England and its designer 1397 Aecom. Rather than the 360mm inlay, they proposed a reinforced polymer modified bitumen (PMB) system. This consisted of a 110mm inlay using Tarmac’s Ultiflex PMB with a 340 Tensar reinforcing geogrid, Glasstex P100, at the interface between concrete and base layer.
This so-called smart asphalt PMB is being laid across all four lanes and should reduce material required from 320,000tonnes for two lanes to 120,000tonnes for four lanes. It should also slash the paving time by up to one-third. At the time that3260 World Highways went to press, around half the asphalt had been laid.
Though both the geogrid and the PMB had been used on many other roads and applications, this solution had never been used on any of Highways England’s network. There was no time for trials. Instead, both Tensar and Tarmac provided evidence and information from previous uses so that the designers and owner could be happy with the deviation from the standard.
The collaborative approach meant that decisions were considered collectively, rather than individually as is the case with the traditional approval process. Traditionally, the contractor makes submissions to the designer who then makes submissions to Highways England, who then considers the submission before signing it off or rejecting it.
What is the Smart Motorways programme?
According to Highways England, congestion on England’s motorways and major roads costs the economy €2.32 billion (£2 billion/$2.49 billion) a year, one quarter of that due to incidents.
Highways England’s Smart Motorways programme aims to claw some of this back through technology to help keep traffic flowing in times of disruption, such as by changing speed limits or warning of congestion ahead. A major element of the agency’s strategy sees the use of hard shoulders, either constantly or on an as-needed basis. Should emergency services need access, the technology – media alerts, variable message signs as examples - can clear a lane.
This isn’t a new concept: the first smart motorway - called a managed motorway - was the M42 when it opened in 2006. Highways England is now rolling smart motorways out far and wide with plans to add more than 6,400km of capacity. The first tranche now underway consists of 10 schemes and two more are pending.“We had a number of meetings, or workshops, with the right people in the room,” says Greenin. “The agreement was made, the I’s were dotted and the T’s crossed during these meetings. That made the approval process simpler. The responsibility for the design still sits with the designer but we are all very aware that we as experts promoting the product will be remembered should there be a failure.”
The whole process was aided by the fact that relationships were already established between Balfour Beatty and Tarmac, as well as between Tarmac and Tensar, adds Greenin. Having Highways England involved in discussions from the beginning was another important success factor. Tarmac is one of three suppliers on a Highways England Category Management Framework for pavements and concrete. There is a similar framework covering gantries and a third covering temporary traffic management. Main contractors such as Balfour Beatty and Costain conduct mini-tenders to procure from framework members.
Yet, despite these examples, involving lower tiers of suppliers in the idea creation process remains a challenge for Highways England and the framework members. “On the Smart Motorways Programme, we have come together with Highways England’s supply chain people and delivery partners to form a supply chain forum. The forum’s remit is to examine how we get the best out of the extended supply chain in terms of the ideas, get people engaged at the right time in the process and how to manage critical resources as momentum builds,” says Stuart. “Work is underway but it’s still fairly early days.”
For both main contractor and subcontractors, a longer visibility of work ahead is vital if they are to commit to new ways of working. This also gives firms the confidence to invest in research and development, as well as training.
Development of collaborative working has been allowed because Highways England has a ring-fenced budget until 2020/21 – the first ever guaranteed multi-year funding. “We have security for the next five years,” says Turton. “We would love to have security for 10 or 20 years, but governments only work in cycles so we cannot commit beyond that five-year window.”
Who’s up for Collaborative Delivery?
Awarded in November 2014, Highways England’s Collaborative Delivery Framework comprises 26 companies which have pre-qualified for work to be let in four lots - three for contracting and one for design.
Lot 1 - Professional design and engineering services; estimated total spend €580 million (£500 million/$622 million):
•2958 Amey
•3005 Atkins
•2874 CH2M HILL United Kingdom
• Hyder Consulting (UK)
•1662 Jacobs UK
•2579 Mott MacDonald/8289 Grontmij
•2377 Mouchel
• Ove1419 Arup & Partners
• URS Infrastructure and Environment (UK)
•8562 WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff
Lot 2 - Medium value contracts valued up to €29 million (£25 million/$31.2 million) which may be extended to €58 million (£50 million/$62.32 million); estimated total spend around €522 million (£450 million/$560 million):
• EM Highway Services
• Geoffrey Osborne
• Interserve Construction
• John6821 Graham Construction
•2849 VolkerFitzpatrick
Lot 3a - High value schemes between €29 million (£25 million/$31.2 million) and €116 million (£100 million/$124.7 million) which may be extended to €348 million (£300 million/$373.3 million); estimated total spend €1.33 billion (£1.15 billion/$1.43 billion):
• Amey
• Galliford Try Infrastructure
•981 HOCHTIEF (UK) Construction
•5486 John Sisk & Son/2340 Lagan
• Construction Group JV
•8139 Kier Group
•3085 VINCI Construction UK (trading as Taylor Woodrow) and Vinci Construction Grands Projects JV
Lot 3b - High value contracts between €116 million (£100 million/$124.7 million) and €522.13 million (£450 million/$561.6 million); estimated total spend €3.36 billion (£2.9 billion/$3.62 billion):
• Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering
•3137 BAM Nuttall/2567 Morgan Sindall JV
•2435 Carillion Construction
• Costain
•2296 Skanska Construction UK
A group of senior managers is being addressed by a local resident who lives close to some proposed road works. The resident is angry, persistent and quite rude. The question is: how will these managers respond?
The resident is, in fact, an actor. The behaviour of the managers is being assessed as part of a selection process for including their companies in a framework contract. Behavioural specialists are also looking at the characters and track records of individuals on a team, case studies, conducting interviews with team leaders and making visits to sites and offices.
This approach was borne out of the need for the public and private sector to deliver more for less following the economic downturn which began in late 2007. The incoming Highways England chief executive Jim O’Sullivan, who took up the post in June 2015, has also underlined the need to improve safety and the customer experience. Tony Turton, who heads up Highways England’s Smart Motorway capital programme, says that the agency could not go on delivering in the same way it had been doing. “We needed to deliver programmes rather than projects and that means all the partners and parties have to work together. Collaboration and behaviour is key to programme delivery.”
Smart Motorway Programme: innovation at work
• CAMERAS ON PLANT EQUIPMENT
Cameras on the arms of excavators when digging drainage trenches is improving safety and boosting operator efficiency.
• BARRIER REMOVAL
Steel barriers are usually manually unbolted from anchors and dismantled for moving. However, the process was made quicker and safer by using demolition equipment to snip the barriers and then an excavator to lift them out.
• PRECAST CENTRAL RESERVATION
Instead of traditional slipform barriers, precast central barriers are faster to install and lower risk in terms of quality.
• CONTINUOUS DUCTING
Ducts come in 6m lengths that require jointing and testing. But delivery partners are considering a continuous-roll ducting system.
• DYNAMIC ROADWORKS
To improve traffic flow when no workers are on site, work zone speed limits are lifted to between 88-96kph (55-60mph).
• JOURNEY TIME INFORMATION
By measuring speed of traffic flow and the distance to the next junction, journey time information and incident news is relayed to drivers.Turton and his colleagues at Highways England want to see members of the framework share best practice and lessons learned, develop new practices and technologies, exchange information about the best use of resources and plan together to get the most out of material and product suppliers.
Risk of the new
One of the recurring frustrations voiced by suppliers and manufacturers is the difficulty in getting great new ideas from laboratory or factory to road. Clients, contractors and designers are often enthusiastic when they hear about a new idea. However, contractual practices can make it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to take on the additional risk of something that isn’t tried and tested.Within the Collaborative Delivery Framework, doing things differently is encouraged. “When you share ideas, you can build on those ideas,” says Richard Stuart, programme director for
Costain won a place on one of four lots which make up the Collaborative Delivery Framework, which covers projects between €116-522 million (£100-450 million/$124-557 million). There are three more lots, two for smaller contract values and one for designers (see box on page 30).
To date the framework has been used to award around €4.06 billion (£3.5 billion / $4.33 billion) worth of projects, including several major upgrades under the Smart Motorways programme, and the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon major improvement scheme.
Stuart has just finished a period of secondment to Highways England’s delivery team for the Smart Motorways programme, overseeing design and delivery of those projects. He says there is a difference in the way contractors working on the 10 different Smart Motorways projects interact with each other.
“There are more direct relationships and communication. A few years ago that would not have happened,” he says. “Particularly on Smart Motorways, there’s a real community that transcends individual organisations. There is still a long way to go, but at the end of the day, it’s in all our interests to make it a real success story.”
Stuart points out that this collaborative spirit has not developed overnight. The change process started with the predecessors to the Collaborative Delivery Framework, the Major Projects and Managed Motorway frameworks.
“It’s something we have been building up to,” says Stuart. The Major Projects Framework, which was let in 2010, saw delivery partners coming together with Highways England to work collaboratively with an eye on the overall programme rather than individual projects.
"Collaboration is founded on relationships, and relationships tend to build. Those first five years saw a lot of relationship building and formed the foundation for the Collaborative Delivery Framework.”
Framework members will be measured on their behaviour and ability to collaborate, although when World Highways spoke to Highways England, the agency was still developing key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be used to measure these aspects. Any problems are also aired at a bi-monthly meeting of senior leaders from all the firms, the Collaborative Transformation Steering Group.
“We look at how we work together, what’s working and what’s not working, defects that are coming up and how we get over them. And how we engage with [supplier] tiers two, three, four,” says Turton. “In many organisations difficult conversations are avoided. What we need to do is change the way we are working together to change the industry.”
The real measure of success will be whether works can be delivered more efficiently. Highways England has set itself some challenging goals: to reduce delivery time each year, by half, half again, a quarter and then a further quarter; to reduce cost by 4% year on year. Turton has already seen the benefits of collaborative behaviour during the previous capital spending period, when he delivered 20% savings on the capital works programme he oversaw. “Behaviour and collaboration were not the whole reason for it, but they were key ingredients. And the same people delivering those schemes are delivering CDF.”
Thinner pavement, less disruption
It is relatively early for new ideas to emerge from the Collaborative Delivery Framework, but even so Stuart is able to list quite a few (see box above). Many of them are quite mundane, such as installing cameras on excavators and simply using different equipment. But if each one works a little bit better and is rolled out quickly across all 10 projects, the saving in time and money soon adds up.When it comes to using products or systems that are new to Highways England, there are cases where the collaborative approach is working well. One example is the use of a geogrid-reinforced pavement on the M3 motorway between junctions 2 and 4a. This allows for a thinner depth of pavement to be inlaid, saving time and cost with less disruption to road users.
Balfour Beatty, the main contractor on this section of motorway, is working on one of the Smart Motorway packages (see box above). Initially, the plan had been to carry out deep inlay works on the hard shoulder and the fast lane, milling the existing asphalt down to a lean-mix concrete base and laying a 360mm inlay in four lifts. However, the scope of work changed when Highways England added an aspiration: a longer maintenance-free period after the works so that travellers were spared further disruption for longer. This new requirement presented a challenge. “One of the constraints was that we had to maintain all the lanes running through the day,” explains Phil Greenin, operations manager for Tarmac, the asphalt supplier. “It would not have been possible to do that with that depth of lift and the curing time required.”
The solution came through collaboration between
This so-called smart asphalt PMB is being laid across all four lanes and should reduce material required from 320,000tonnes for two lanes to 120,000tonnes for four lanes. It should also slash the paving time by up to one-third. At the time that
Though both the geogrid and the PMB had been used on many other roads and applications, this solution had never been used on any of Highways England’s network. There was no time for trials. Instead, both Tensar and Tarmac provided evidence and information from previous uses so that the designers and owner could be happy with the deviation from the standard.
The collaborative approach meant that decisions were considered collectively, rather than individually as is the case with the traditional approval process. Traditionally, the contractor makes submissions to the designer who then makes submissions to Highways England, who then considers the submission before signing it off or rejecting it.
What is the Smart Motorways programme?
According to Highways England, congestion on England’s motorways and major roads costs the economy €2.32 billion (£2 billion/$2.49 billion) a year, one quarter of that due to incidents.
Highways England’s Smart Motorways programme aims to claw some of this back through technology to help keep traffic flowing in times of disruption, such as by changing speed limits or warning of congestion ahead. A major element of the agency’s strategy sees the use of hard shoulders, either constantly or on an as-needed basis. Should emergency services need access, the technology – media alerts, variable message signs as examples - can clear a lane.
This isn’t a new concept: the first smart motorway - called a managed motorway - was the M42 when it opened in 2006. Highways England is now rolling smart motorways out far and wide with plans to add more than 6,400km of capacity. The first tranche now underway consists of 10 schemes and two more are pending.“We had a number of meetings, or workshops, with the right people in the room,” says Greenin. “The agreement was made, the I’s were dotted and the T’s crossed during these meetings. That made the approval process simpler. The responsibility for the design still sits with the designer but we are all very aware that we as experts promoting the product will be remembered should there be a failure.”
The whole process was aided by the fact that relationships were already established between Balfour Beatty and Tarmac, as well as between Tarmac and Tensar, adds Greenin. Having Highways England involved in discussions from the beginning was another important success factor. Tarmac is one of three suppliers on a Highways England Category Management Framework for pavements and concrete. There is a similar framework covering gantries and a third covering temporary traffic management. Main contractors such as Balfour Beatty and Costain conduct mini-tenders to procure from framework members.
Yet, despite these examples, involving lower tiers of suppliers in the idea creation process remains a challenge for Highways England and the framework members. “On the Smart Motorways Programme, we have come together with Highways England’s supply chain people and delivery partners to form a supply chain forum. The forum’s remit is to examine how we get the best out of the extended supply chain in terms of the ideas, get people engaged at the right time in the process and how to manage critical resources as momentum builds,” says Stuart. “Work is underway but it’s still fairly early days.”
For both main contractor and subcontractors, a longer visibility of work ahead is vital if they are to commit to new ways of working. This also gives firms the confidence to invest in research and development, as well as training.
Development of collaborative working has been allowed because Highways England has a ring-fenced budget until 2020/21 – the first ever guaranteed multi-year funding. “We have security for the next five years,” says Turton. “We would love to have security for 10 or 20 years, but governments only work in cycles so we cannot commit beyond that five-year window.”
Who’s up for Collaborative Delivery?
Awarded in November 2014, Highways England’s Collaborative Delivery Framework comprises 26 companies which have pre-qualified for work to be let in four lots - three for contracting and one for design.
Lot 1 - Professional design and engineering services; estimated total spend €580 million (£500 million/$622 million):
•
•
•
• Hyder Consulting (UK)
•
•
•
• Ove
• URS Infrastructure and Environment (UK)
•
Lot 2 - Medium value contracts valued up to €29 million (£25 million/$31.2 million) which may be extended to €58 million (£50 million/$62.32 million); estimated total spend around €522 million (£450 million/$560 million):
• EM Highway Services
• Geoffrey Osborne
• Interserve Construction
• John
•
Lot 3a - High value schemes between €29 million (£25 million/$31.2 million) and €116 million (£100 million/$124.7 million) which may be extended to €348 million (£300 million/$373.3 million); estimated total spend €1.33 billion (£1.15 billion/$1.43 billion):
• Amey
• Galliford Try Infrastructure
•
•
• Construction Group JV
•
•
Lot 3b - High value contracts between €116 million (£100 million/$124.7 million) and €522.13 million (£450 million/$561.6 million); estimated total spend €3.36 billion (£2.9 billion/$3.62 billion):
• Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering
•
•
• Costain
•
