Efficiency, productivity and innovation: The case for sustainability

And the great family story is that he came out of school at 16. He went and said to his father, ‘I’m going to build a crane because we need one for the foundry’.

So he went off and built a crane. He designed it, built it himself and then finished it, and his dad said, ‘So what are you going to do now?’ He said, ‘I’m going to build another one,’ and his dad said, ‘There’ll never be enough work for two cranes in Sydney.’

But he did. He went off and he innovated from the very beginning. And that’s something that’s been drilled into us all the way through our lives about you’ve got to innovate, you’ve got to stand out, you’ve got to push the boundaries constantly.

We’re constantly challenging ourselves, and constantly looking at ways of improving our business. Whether it’s through product, whether it’s about how we integrate that product into a project, about how we communicate with our clients. I think what we’ve done really well is we’ve built trust within the market, with our clients where they know they can trust us to deliver them a solution.

And that’s really, really important. And that’s sometimes where we struggle in new markets because we’re trying to go into a client and we’re trying to say to them, here’s a completely different way of looking at how to do this but it will drive really positive outcomes for you around safety, because you’ve got less lifting and you’ve got less cranes on site, and around productivity. You can increase your productivity through less lifting, bigger lifts, and then that has a direct impact on your schedule.

How can you engage with sustainability in the industry?

I think the word sustainability gets thrown around a lot without really understanding what it means and I think there are so many dimensions to sustainability, and it’s not just about what type of power are you using to operate your equipment or what type of material you’re using on your project.

There are so many different sides to that model of sustainability. One of the key things that doesn’t get talked about a lot is around productivity. I think productivity is up there as one of the most influential factors on how sustainable a project is.

For us, as a business, our crane fleets predominantly run on diesel cranes, because they’re very, very productive, highly productive, they have high speed winches, they work in really strong winds, and we get a really high lifting capacity out of those cranes. That’s part of it.

But the other thing is, how do we take that diesel engine and turn it into a more sustainable engine. We’ve done that through adopting renewable diesel that we’re using at the moment, with HVO fuel, which is a zero emissions fuel, so we can bring that into our machines – that’s been a big move forward for us.

But I still only see that as really a very, very small part of sustainability because the cranes use such a small amount of fuel. A Toyota Land Cruiser uses more fuel than the biggest machines we have which is the largest capacity tower crane in the world. The fuel part of it is a very small piece. The bit that’s really interesting is around the productivity gains we get.
We just finished a project in Turkey where we worked on the world’s biggest suspension bridge.

We developed a crane methodology that let the client completely change the way they were going to construct the bridge and we got involved really, really early in the design stage, and we got the client to realign their construction methodology and take it to a fully modular construction. They were going to lift individual panels and build the bridge structure up 320 metres in individual steel panels, and we got to box those out and make them into full modules.

Instead of lifting one panel, we lifted eight together. Originally, they were around 20-tonne panels and we took them up into 160-tonne modules. What that did was it drove the programme, and it meant the bridge actually ended up opening over 12 months ahead of schedule. We played a part in that, which was getting the towers up as quickly as we could. That then set the scene for the other trades to come through, all the other subcontractors to come through and finish up the bridge.

From a sustainability point of view, if we can get efficiencies in the construction, we weren’t really trying to effect what type of materials they use, but we can give clients a choice around whether they want to use modular steel or modular concrete, bigger precast elements, bigger steel members, less of them, less temporary works, and less congestion on project. That all leads, if we do it correctly, and we work closely with our clients, it should reduce the timeframe. That leads to a smaller carbon footprint on a project.

Should the conversation around sustainability shift to productivity and efficiency rather than a focus on energy and materials in which case?

I think that’s the missing link that people don’t seem to talk about. I saw a white paper that was released by one of the large UK contractors a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking around fuel and materials, but they weren’t talking about productivity, and I thought that’s interesting. They’ve completely missed that in their white paper. Sure, the fuel’s part of it, yes, I agree with that, and materials as well.

But that’s just one piece of the jigsaw. If we don’t look at sustainability holistically, then we’re going to miss something that’s not going to drive the right outcome. Some of those conversations and challenges become really difficult, especially around productivity and around methods of construction.

Because often, especially the construction industry, people are so set in their ways about how they’ve done stuff, there’s techniques they’re using now that we’re using to build the pyramids, and that hasn’t changed a lot.

We have to use technology, we have to use new methods, and we’ve got to drive that to get a really positive outcome in construction. We’ve got to get people to think differently, and that’s one of the things we talk about in our business always about think differently, challenge the norm, let’s push things as hard as we can.

We do that in our machines, in our cranes, even around what type of materials we use. We’re trying to do that so we can get more for less out, and that’s what it’s about.

What is your outlook for the construction sector?

I think if you look at what’s happening globally at the moment, around sustainability, around some of the global conflicts that are going on at the moment, I think there’s a real shift that’s happening across the market on a number of different fronts. If you look at the sustainability part, it’s almost like we’re heading into the next Industrial Revolution of our generation. That’s quite interesting.

I mean, you’ve got this completely shift away from traditional power sources, and everyone’s talking about hydrogen, wind, solar, nuclear, all sorts, and countries are invested in that. And then you’ve got conflict that’s happening in Ukraine and then you’ve got a shift away from Russian-supplied materials and gas and whatever else to other parts of the world.

I think it’s a really interesting period that we’re coming into. And that there are knock-on effects into all sorts of infrastructure. As we’re coming out of the back of Covid-19 governments are having a huge impact on construction.

For example, back in Australia there’s a big spend on infrastructure, which is the government tipping money straight back into the economy, hopefully as efficiently and as quickly as they can, which is creating jobs, it’s creating wealth in the country.