New technologies and services
Design planning research makes a global impact
Company
Adept Management
Expertise
School of Civil and Building Engineering
An idea developed through 20 years of academic research is today making an impact on global construction projects worth billions of pounds.
In the early 1990s, Simon Austin, now a Professor of Structural Engineering, was a Loughborough academic interested in design planning. Inadequate planning at the design stage was leading to expensive delays and corrective work on most large, complex construction projects.
Simon explored practical solutions to this problem, developing a method to map the factors that influence the design process and then coordinate activities to optimize efficiency. This was achieved using dependency structure matrices – a mathematical technique which highlights information flows and task sequences.
The method – called ADePT – helps identify the coordination challenges experienced on complex projects early on in the design process – saving time and money. It is in effect a successor to the critical path method, but with the advantage that it can be used to analyse iterative, not just sequential, activities like design.
The birth of ADePT was made possible by a strategic relationship between academia and industry, specifically Loughborough University and AMEC, then a multinational engineering company and now a global business offering consultancy, engineering and project management to the oil and gas, minerals and metals, clean energy, environment and infrastructure markets.]
Research fed into the development of ADePT over several years, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the University, AMEC and a host of other industrial partners. As part of this research, ADePT was developed from theory into prototype software, which proved the concept but lacked the sophistication required for industrial use.
To move the project forward further, Simon Austin and John Steele, an AMEC employee whose Loughborough PhD had been supervised by Simon, were awarded fellowships from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. These grants gave Simon and John a year to explore options for commercialising the research. After extensive consideration, a spin-out company was formed with business-angel investment. Four of Simon’s former researchers and also AMEC employees formed the spin-out Adept Management in 2001 and AMEC was one of the new company’s first clients.
The spin-out licensed a software development company to turn ADePT into a fully operational product and the new company grew quickly. Today, Adept Management’s consultants are working at the cutting edge of design management and process streamlining; and have expanded their reach to non-construction engineering sectors, including aerospace engine, aircraft and ship development.
Impact
- 11 out of 15 of Building Magazine’s top contractors by turnover (July 2011) are users of ADePT
- Manufacturing and construction work per year using ADePT is circa £1Bn in value and the combined value of current projects circa £3.5Bn
- Adept Management has clients in Europe, North America, South East Asia and the Middle East
- ADePT won the DETR/Construction News innovation award in 1999