With The Great British Bake Off back on TV, Dan Rossiter compares construction with baking.
While watching the best of our British bakers produce a plethora of pastries on The Great British Bake-off, I suddenly came to a realization. Construction is a lot like baking.
If you, like me, try to attend many of the excellent UK BIM Alliance and BIM Region events to keep up to date with Building Information Modelling (BIM), you have probably heard from some great industry leaders. However, you may have also heard something like this:
“Construction needs to move towards how things are done in the automotive industry; they have been doing BIM and digital twins for years!”
This kind of statement confounds me, how can you compare the two? While both industries are mostly made up of small to medium enterprises (around 99% of both industries), the similarities end there.
In the automotive industry, billions are spent on research and development with prototypes being constructed, tested, and deconstructed countless times before a product is finalized. While in construction, research and development work is included within the design fee; a fraction of the final asset cost. Except for a few exceptions like Atkins’ Sunesis, we research, design, and build an asset once.
While I reject the automotive analogy, there is an industry I consider much more comparable to construction; baking! In fact, the bake-off technical challenge can be seen as a good example of the issues associated with poor construction briefs.