Improving the virtual structure of the project that McLaren Construction commissioned Thomas Flannery when he arrived at the end of 2022, and that’s precisely what the contractor is doing on £500 million projects.
McLaren Construction is on track to surpass the £1 billion annual turnover mark in 2023/24. That’s a lot of cash for a family-owned business that was founded in 2001 and now employs 900 people.
Notable projects include the expansion of ExCeL London, ongoing paintings on developer Quintain’s leased property at Wembley Park, the new Salvation Army headquarters, an F1 headquarters for Aston Martin, and projects for leading developers such as British Land, Argent, Tishman Speyer, Aviva. and Landsec.
But as Thomas Flannery, the company’s head of virtual structure, says: “Sometimes, when organizations develop very quickly, their systems don’t necessarily grow at the same rate. That’s why we needed to align many of our processes and systems to reflect the fact that McLaren is now a £1 billion Tier 1 contractor.
“When organizations grow very quickly, their systems don’t necessarily grow at the same rate. We needed to align our processes and systems to reflect the fact that McLaren is now a £1 billion subcontractor.
And that’s where Flannery. Il joined McLaren in November 2022 from Lendlease, where he was head of virtual engineering and leading primary regeneration projects such as Elephant Park in south London.
“When I arrived, McLaren already had a strategic brief, written by Adam Nicholson, director of pre-construction. I came here to take a look at the existing strategy brief and assess the existing virtual environment – how we deliver our projects,” says Flannery.
He grew the virtual team to a core of 16 or 17 more people and implemented a new software regimen that transforms internal power and earned top praise from across the company.
Flannery discusses his role and the implementation of McLaren’s strategy.
Thomas Flannery: McLaren used to rely heavily on external consultants. That’s why one of my key roles is to create the virtual framing team with a length suitable for a Tier 1 contractor.
I looked at existing partners and software vendors and tried to identify what the belief was about software at McLaren, to see if there was a negative belief and, if so, to perceive why.
I also looked at the processes we had in place: how we were going to deliver projects, digitally only, but also how we managed knowledge across the organization.
Since that initial assessment, the virtual team grew to a core of thirteen people. Not all of them are virtual structure professionals, as they also incorporated the data governance service and have committed implementation managers who take care of implementation, support, and more.
The belief in the organizations I’d worked in before was that there was no alignment – there were BIM admins here and data stewards elsewhere. But we’ve brought them together, with a real focus on data sharing within McLaren.
We also re-evaluate how we work with our existing software, analyze how we implement it in projects, and move forward by making use of existing systems.
And we will only introduce new technologies when necessary. We reviewed our cash control software from the beginning and re-evaluated it: suitability and protection forms, permits, etc.
The expansion of ExCeL London is one of more than 10 McLaren assignments that have been virtual from day one with a virtual structure strategy agreed from the outset with the assignment team. The main platforms used include Dalux for box control activities, BIMcollab for factor control, Synchro for structure sequencing, and Oculo for progress capture.
ExCeL London’s £220 million expansion will expand the venue’s existing 100,000 m² of exhibition and convention facilities by 25%. In addition to the fact that it is very important to ExCeL that its continuous event program is not interrupted, the assignment of the structure is adapted to other sensitivities. The flight path to London City Airport, the proximity of a Docklands Light Railway viaduct to one side, and the thirteen-metre water intensity at the Royal Docks are express for this place. Nearby hotels, the paths that connect to the fairgrounds remain presentable and deliveries by road are maintained.
McLaren took on the task as prime contractor in November 2022 with a streamlined schedule and committed to delivering on time for the October 2024 venue event.
That’s why we’ve signed a corporate agreement with software specialist Dalux. Our philosophy has been to try to use the best-in-class generation provider. We have Asite for our main CDE, Dalux works as a cash control platform and also use Solibri as our main design coordination tool.
Working with open BIM and open knowledge formats across the organization has been a genuine goal. And over the last year, we’ve set up the virtual environment, we’ve set up the processes, we’ve created a limited library of templates and documents to implement in this project. We now have a set of highly evolved procedures, and not only in virtual construction, that allow us to adopt consistency in the deployment.
From a virtual structure perspective, we deliver projects worth over £500 million, or around 30 projects, and that includes the client’s asset data requirements. McLaren is now able to temporarily respond to the needs of visitors and has a very agile organisation.
When I joined the company, there was a lot of internal attention on the Construction Safety Act; We were looking at how we could best meet those new legislative requirements, especially those similar to the golden thread. As the prime contractor, we needed to be able to demonstrate to regulators what was considered evidence of conforming construction.
As a result, when it comes to naming our source chain at this time, we’ve developed our own unique technique for specifying data needs as a contractor, in which we incorporate this need for compliant construction testing. This provides us with a very high-level review that we can then use as a component of a top threat building application. We can demonstrate this common thread, which allows the boat protection regulator to assimilate our technique and temporarily facilitate timely decisions about vessels.
It’s been piloted. We implemented it in a project, we got some feedback. . . Yesterday we did a review, we are evolving it. The concept is that we will put this into our projects in April.
At the moment it’s just a spreadsheet. It’s a specification document, but we’re looking at other options. Once the documents are in place, we need to look at how we integrate them with our core systems, as well as employ Microsoft Fabric for our knowledge lake or knowledge warehouse. where all our knowledge is completed. We need this briefing paper to act as our Rosetta Stone for assignment deliverables.
We’re talking to some experts about a custom solution that would allow us to track the knowledge we get from Asite and Dalux compared to what we asked for in the data exchange requirements we set out at the start of the project.
We’ve completed a lot in the last 18 months since I’ve been in the organization. And we know what we need to do in the next 12 months. The strategy is evolving and developing.
Landsec appointed McLaren last October as the contractor for the redevelopment of Thirty High, an iconic 1960s tower in Victoria, London, into an office-oriented destination.
The digital structure proved indispensable to the Thirty High project, beyond its traditional function of three-dimensional coordination. McLaren used point cloud analysis of the existing asset, providing accurate photogrammetric insights to the design process. In addition, the company leveraged 4D modeling to meticulously plan assignment logistics and structural sequences, ensuring that the task progresses as scheduled.
The 300,000-square-foot tower is expected to be completed in 2025, at a total cost of £400 million.
All of this helps us increase productivity and efficiency. We need to be an efficient organization: we don’t need to increase our overhead costs as we grow. For McLaren, it’s all about biological expansion and profit.
To grow without too many overhead costs, efficiency is necessary. One of them is to digitize internal processes. You can make someone’s task a lot less difficult by offering them the equipment and technology, and making the administrative aspect of their task much less. Difficult and simplified. And it allows them to go out and build projects.
You can see the participation. Asite is widely used in the organization. And with Dalux, in the 8 months since the corporate agreement was signed, we have opened 14,000 responsibilities and forms. In the past, some of them could be just pen and paper and kept in an on-site record. It’s definitely a power gain. And we also received intelligent feedback from the site’s teams: using Dalux makes your task much easier, puts the data in your hands.
We’ve invested heavily in things like iPads, laptops, and iPhones. Our IT branch reports seeing an increase in the amount of bandwidth required for a project. And it’s a byproduct of the virtual strategy we’re implementing.
We held virtual workshops across the organization (we call it “handing over our tasks virtually”) that brought the virtual strategy closer to everyone and exposed task managers to it. Part of the explanation for this is that we’re helping others transition to the new way of working, and from the feedback we’ve gained to date, they’re embracing it as well.
One thing he emphasized was the importance of dating. It was definitely a learning experience – getting other people involved in this adventure was really important. And the appointments we’ve had with IT have been pretty refreshing. The IT branch is very pleased that we are at the forefront, owning the formula and implementing it in the project. And we have your answer in case of technical problems, in the background. . . We know who to communicate with.
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