M-AR recently celebrated its 15th anniversary as a business with big plans to scale up its modular operations. We caught up with Operations Director, Mark Fox, to find out more about its sustained and successful growth.
Q: M-AR recently joined the UK's modular housing trade body, Make UK Modular – is more industry collaboration required to drive forward the volumetric industry and realise the full potential of offsite construction?
Mark Fox (MF): Absolutely. We're all up against the same challenges in the built environment, not least the skills crisis that seems insurmountable in the medium to long term, and the need to build more sustainably too. For our part at M-AR, we want to bring together brilliant minds from across the industry who can help find ways to tackle these issues. Beyond that, we believe that some clients are turned off by our industry as we fall into the trap of selling something 'special' to fluff up our sales and marketing campaigns, without realising that we've got much more in common with other forms of construction than we dare say. Afterall, modular is a process, not a product. We all use materials you can find in any builder's merchant, just in a more efficient, reliable and controlled way. Industry-wide collaboration is vital if we're to realise the full potential of offsite construction.
Q: The UK housing market has faced a shortfall in new homes for decades with an increasing number of 'market disrupters' offering various answers – how does M-AR fit in to this dynamic?
MF: We're in the mix, but it's important to realise we're only a small cog in a very large machine that is the housing delivery machine. We all rely on a good supply of land, planning permission and finance before we can put a shovel in the ground and a spanner on the shop floor. Volumetric modular has a place, and we're quietly bridging our ambitions with today's realities of business. It's a fine line to align this as a business model and that is why we don't just deliver housing. In our business model housing plays a part in our pipeline, variable in quantity subject to market conditions.
Q: Your track record of achievements has been impressive including the recent Centrepoint scheme, that also demonstrated the range of clients for modular homes. Have you been finding clients and specifiers understanding the finer details of volumetric methods better?
MF: There's certainly been an uptick in awareness in recent years with many clients increasingly seeing the benefits of delivering differently through offsite construction methods. Understanding is somewhat of a challenge though, so it's really important that clients get the right advice for their project especially as there's been a proliferation in organisations claiming offsite and modern methods of construction (MMC) expertise with little hands on experience. This is one of the reasons why we aim to be open and transparent with our technology and offering, so we can help the industry upskill itself and learn from our success and challenges. Our regular open days are a way for us show what we can do as well as to share ideas and best practice with others working in the MMC sphere.
Q: Factory-design and volumetric modular systems can help deliver 'net zero' housing and reduce the construction sector's carbon footprint. How is M-AR delivering sustainability and affordability with net zero targets in mind?
MF: We'd say we're doing ok but balancing affordability and net zero ambition is a real challenge for everyone. Saying that, adopting a modular construction method makes controlling outcomes much more predictable when considering design versus actual performance and bridging the performance gap. Like many others we start with the building fabric and work out to renewable energy systems. As always, we're keen to understand what clients actually want as words and phrases such as 'sustainability', 'net zero' and 'passive' are often used as by-words for wider strategic drivers. We've found that most of our best value schemes aren't dogmatic about how we deliver the solution or are about achieving compliance for compliance's sake, we always balance performance with capital and operational cost.
Q: Away from housing, you have delivered several projects in the education and commercial sectors e.g. for KFC Restaurants, how easy is it to reconfigure the prefabrication process from living room to classroom for example?
MF: Easier than you might think from a product perspective as our product isn't massively different between our market sector applications and to the untrained eye probably looks the same. We opted to try and make our base product flexible and repeatable and standardise the components that users can easily interact with. The key difference is in the non-modular services we offer to those sectors such as design, construction, and aftercare. An end user in a social housing building is very different to an end user at a school. We've had to work hard at our process for operation and aftercare and learned many lessons to effectively tailor our offering to meet client's needs.
Q: The use of technology and digital tools within factory environments is central to offsite manufacture with additional rollout of toolkits, platform approaches, repeatable components and harmonised design – how is M-AR developing this Industry 4.0 approach?
MF: We implemented Autodesk BIM 360 Build into our business a couple of years ago and we're really starting to benefit from using the underlying data this is offering us – we're building smarter and are able to catch any potential issues before they even arise. We're on the road with repeatable components and see many useful applications in our day-to-day delivery and we're working out how to really integrate platforms into our business. We believe that we can be smarter and offer much more by way of solutions to the market in the coming years, and we're keen to keep learning and collaborating with other like-minded organisations to do this.
Q: Being named as a supplier on the Crown Commercial Service's Offsite Construction Solutions framework is an affirmation of your approach and provides opportunities to showcase your modular expertise – what are you hoping to deliver through the appointment?
MF: New thinking! The Crown Commercial Service £10billion Off Site Framework represents a significant opportunity to our sector, and we were pleased to be named earlier this year amongst our well-respected peers, it is a statement of how far we have come. The four-year framework, which may extend a further three years covering a period of seven years in total, aims to support the public sector to innovate, drive efficiency and work towards net zero targets. SMEs like us like to champion new ideas and ways of thinking, so we're keen to work with many of their public sector clients on finding new ways of delivering better.
Q: M-AR unveiled a 'mission statement' earlier in the year with a vision to: "drive change through fresh thinking… and challenge accepted industry norms". What ideally do you want to see from an M-AR perspective over the next 18 months and how do you see the volumetric modular sector developing generally?
MF: After lots of growth, we're keen to consolidate our efforts and refine down areas we know can be better and we have identified points within our strategy to do this. At a sector level we'd love to see a focus on client needs and wants, and we see a world where volumetric providers really prioritise the on-site works and services to deliver consistently for clients who are asking for turnkey contractors like ourselves. This area of the market is under served, and many providers focus only on the manufacture piece of the puzzle. We'd see that as a missed opportunity to turn clients away, so we expect to see developments of either self-delivering volumetric businesses or the rise of interesting partnerships between traditional contractors and volumetric providers to answer this challenge.
For more information visit: www.m-ar.co.uk
Images: 01. Mark Fox, Operations Director, M-AR 02. The Centrepoint project has successfully used volumetric modular methods to award-winning effect 03. Stourton Park & Ride, Leeds 04. BOHO 8 office accommodation, Middlesborough 05-06. Summer 2023. M-AR' Hull factory hosts regular open days
