Ryan Geldard, M-AR’s Operations Director, explains how challenging accepted industry norms and adopting a collaborative approach with clients and peers is beneficial all round, but especially for those who call an M-AR building ‘home’.
Offsite contractor M-AR is proud to take a people-centric approach to everything it does by putting collaboration at the heart of its business. As an industry, collectively keeping our cards close to our chest and keeping innovations and new ideas under wraps doesn’t serve anyone. Earlier this year, we hosted a very successful event at our head office and factory in Hull, which demonstrated just how vital collaboration is to the future of MMC and that by working together, we can solve the housing crisis.
The event, which was hailed as a ‘game changer’, brought together several key modular manufacturers and contractors with the aim of unlocking the full potential of offsite construction technology for affordable housing developer, Pocket Living. It provided a platform for key stakeholders to share ideas and best practice in response to Pocket Living’s brief to find the most efficient and cost-effective offsite turnkey solution to delivering apartment development schemes of varying sizes.
Offsite – but not as you know it
As part of our work with Pocket Living, we’ve effectively ‘open sourced’ our specialist offsite design technology for the project, in the form of our BOPAS accredited Gen2 Modular System.
The idea is to use this as a starting point to develop an effective and workable design as a basis to which all suppliers on the Pocket Living framework would work towards. Repeating an agreed design in this way gives housing developers reliable costings and timings for each scheme, while allowing scope for some flexibility of design to tailor the schemes to their locations and to meet the needs of future residents.
Alun Macey, Construction and Innovation Director at Pocket Living commented: “We believe that modular construction is ideally suited to our schemes but the biggest cost and time savings of offsite generally seem to be reserved for much larger scale projects comprising hundreds of units. We knew there would be another way for us to enjoy the benefits of offsite so we’re very grateful to M-AR for hosting this event and creating a platform for open and honest discussion with key players in the industry. It’s an exciting chapter in the Pocket Living story as well as for the wider offsite construction sector and it just goes to show how we can all reap the rewards by thinking outside the box.”
It’s precisely this outside the box thinking and challenging of accepted industry norms that has led us to create some of our most striking residential projects to date. Projects such as Waterside Gardens at Wigan Pier, which recently won the Offsite/ MMC award with the Insulated Render and Cladding Association. We’ve also been shortlisted in the Most Innovative Supplier category at this year’s Housing Digital Innovation Awards thanks to our forward-thinking approach as an offsite contractor.
And we are thrilled to have been named Business of the Year (over 51 employees) at the Hull Live Business Awards with the Hull Daily Mail. We've grown rapidly in the last few years and this award is testament to the hard work of everyone at M-AR and it means the world to us. We’re continually looking to the future and working collectively as an industry is the ideal way for us ensure the future of MMC.
To see the full article, go to Offsite Magazine
