CONSTRUCTION CHALLENGES
We interviewed architects, construction professionals and engineers, attended several construction trade shows, and conducted a survey to understand the industry's challenges and pain points.
The following are the key construction challenges we want to fix:
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Poor Design Coordination
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Technology
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Late Client’s Changes
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Technical Design development
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Labour
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Traditional Procurement
TRADITIONAL PROCUREMENT
Lack of collaboration
The biggest challenge in Traditional Procurement, including Design and Build, is the lack of collaboration among players from design consultants to subcontractors. The lack of shared risks and rewards, the adversarial relationship, and the overall lack of trust are examples of collaboration challenges in traditional procurement.
Another challenge in traditional procurement is the Late engagement of supply chain, such as mechanical and electrical engineers, causing poor design coordination.
Most respondents to our survey said better collaboration and communication were their main wish for the construction industry.
DESIGN COORDINATION CHALLENGES
Poor Design Coordination is driven by challenges in traditional procurement, such as late supply chain engagement (e.g., mechanical and electrical subcontractors) and a general lack of collaboration.
In addition, the introduction of BIM and the use of various software in the design phase pose technological challenges that contribute to poor design coordination.
Traditional Procurement: Late supply chain engagement (notably Mechanical and Electrical engineers - MEP)
72% of the participants in our survey found that late design changes due to poor coordination with Mechanical and Electrical engineers are very frequent. Only 1% said it is straightforward to deal with.
” Late Changes in the design due to poor collaboration with MEP engineers/subcontractors, as they are coordinated late in the project, then with their changes, we need to go back and recalculate the design, like the slab. Every project happens this poor MEP coordination causing late design changes”.
– Structural engineer's interview.
” So normally, the MEP designer isn't novated to the contractor, while structures and architects often are. So typically, the MEP Consultant has said, Here's my design and they sit and check if it's okay. Afterwards, the contractor gets on an entirely new company to take that design and to build it.
Issues arise from the gap between what was designed and what will actually be built, causing project delays. So one company (consultant) has done all the details for the tender, and then the new company, the subcontractor, is building it, and that particular subcontractor has to do a lot more design at the next stage”.
– Architect's interview
Traditional Procurement: Changes in the design causing weak tender documents
63% of respondents to our survey said that changes in design up to the contractor's tender in a Design and Build procurement route are frequent and challenging. Those changes cause incomplete or inaccurate design in the tender documents.
"What you're trying to get to is everyone being at the same level with enough details at the end. If you start perfectly, develop what you've planned, and progress in a linear way, you will have a ton of information and be very clear. That's the ideal scenario. What actually happens along the way is that the design changes. As a result, there's not enough time to effectively develop all the information to that end-goal I talked about. What usually happens is the deadline is fixed, and it all just has to be absorbed in this space. So the quicker you stop changing and doing all these things, the more we can write and draw, which makes it clearer what the next stage is.
The point is, to tender the construction job, you need an accurate final design and accurate information, because most contractors will only price something they think has been adequately thought through and works. If they see lots of gaps and holes in the design, they likely decide that they're going to price it as they believe they'll make lots of money through correcting the errors, or they'll put a very high price against it with the risk because they think the design is not quite right".
– Architect's interview
LABOUR
Rising Labour Costs
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75% of the participants in our survey mentioned that it is essential to minimise the cost of construction, and only 25% are satisfied.
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Gleeds’ Q3 2025 UK Construction Market Report highlights that 75% of contractor respondents noticed increases in labour rates.
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The Q4 2024 Gardiner & Theobald market update highlights the rise of labour cost pressure and tightening supply-side subcontractor capacity from insolvencies.
Labour Shortage
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Gleeds’ Q3 2025 UK Construction Market Report highlights that 54% of contractor respondents experienced issues with labour availability.
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251,500 Extra workers will be required to meet UK construction output by 2028, or 50,300 per year, according to CITB.
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According to the Deconstruction’s 2024 annual pulse survey on 2,000 UK adults, more than two-thirds (68%) of respondents said that they’d never consider a career in construction.
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At the current trajectory of stagnant productivity and slow or negative projected workforce growth, global construction output might fall short of demand by $40 trillion cumulatively by 2040, according to McKinsey.
Low Labour Productivity
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The productivity level in the UK construction industry has remained consistently below the UK average, according to ONS.
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Both the Architectural, engineering and Construction sectors experienced lower productivity than the whole UK economy (source ONS).
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41% of the respondents to our survey mentioned that the delays in construction program because some subcontractors and trade workers don’t show up during the planned sequences are frequent and challenging. Reasons range from sickness or a trade worker being busy on another site to other reasons.
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"Subcontractors don’t show up on time on their planned schedule, causing delay in the current and next sequence and negatively impacting all construction sequences. Time is critical because there are other trades to follow, and it knocks everybody back. You hear lots of excuses. They are sick, and the van is broken. It can happen maybe once a week, twice a week". – Project manager interview.
TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES
2D/3D Design Coordination
" All architects basically design in digital formats. Then contractors will often also do BIM modelling to build in more detail to check constructability. However, the interface between the two is a 2-D printed sheet of drawings, which are the contractual drawings. I find that astonishing because just from a data perspective, the amount of information lost when you take something that was in the virtual environment and print it out, that feels to me to be a very inefficient process”
– Construction dive article.
" The reason clash detection doesn't get picked earlier is because structural engineers and architects are more likely to model in 3D in a lot more detail early and keep building up. The way MEP engineers typically work is that they would be a bit more 2D. It's a bit markup based on plans. Then at some point they start modelling it, and that's when, in detail, they realise it doesn't work”
– Architect's interview
Digital Data Quality
What we're looking to achieve is consistency in all the information produced across the different consultants, and the way we assess that is essentially when it goes into the common data environment. All of the naming and numbering is accurate and consistent, and the approval process, the check and review have been undertaken, and the information is moved in from the different states, from work in progress to published and archived if it needs to be".
– BIM Manager's interview
” Common data environments can be really time-consuming and laborious. Everything needs to be named and numbered correctly. On a project, you could have hundreds of drawings you'd need to add and upload at any one time. So current data environments, yeah, they're a bit of a challenge, because they're still manual entry that needs to go into them. It's not all manuals. Some of it is automated, but there's still a lot of manual processes, which slows down, which could be automated, absolutely”.
– BIM Manager's interview
Software Interoperability
" I don't design the whole building with one piece of software. I use multiple pieces. So then, packaging all that up takes much time as well. My structural design software is not integrated with Revit. I need to manually put the data from Revit into the structural design software and introduce mistakes as well. So that must be double-checked and triple-checked. Every project has human errors. The errors slow down the design process”
– Structural engineer's interview
Organisations across different specialities, such as architecture, groundwork, steelwork, façades, and specialist product manufacturers, use different design software, which often produce various file formats that aren’t always compatible with one another. In contrast, these can sometimes be forced together, for example, by placing an .ifc file into a Revit project. The .ifc (or other exported file type) will behave differently within the project than a native family, which could cause complications when it comes to design revisions, extraction of technical data, and BOM generation from the project.
– Solina article
CLIENT LATE CHANGES
The Client’s late changes are the 3rd most frequent reason for delays and cost overruns in construction projects.
"I would say regularly, clients change their minds. Even after a contractor is appointed, the client can change their mind on some part of the design. The main reason for client changes is that the budget hasn't been approved. Programs need to change. Other aspects of the company have altered in certain areas of the world. It could be several different things. You never know. The clients changing their minds is a regular thing”.
– Consultant's interview
TECHNICAL DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
Only 3% of respondents to our survey said that technical design development at RIBA stages 4-5 is straightforward.
Only 13% of the interviewees stated that it is straightforward for a structural engineer to calculate and maximise the utilisation rate of a building frame, leading to a lower utilisation rate of the structure and higher material usage.
