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  4. Kit of Parts

At Manchester Airport, our team, working alongside contractor Mace, has been reimagining design and construction with a new approach. We call it our kit-of-parts approach. Efficient and sustainable it creates a road map to a more affordable way of doing things, with a range design benefits, it’s part of the wider transformation in adopting Industrialised Construction changing the way we design and make our buildings worldwide.

Meeting one of society’s most pressing needs

In every populated region in the globe, there’s an urgent need for more construction – whether to increase housing stock or upgrade vital amenities.

But construction brings a lot of challenges. It takes time to put buildings together on site and to work to budget, there are often restrictions about where and how you can build, skills shortages, and access to materials.

Building methods have been the same for hundreds of years. Work takes place onsite, over a long time, with a huge team, because that it is the way it is. With kit-of-parts we have the technology to rethink the process and meet the needs our clients have today, which are very different.

Location

  • Manchester, North West England, UK

Client

  • Mace and Manchester Airport Group

Project Status

  • Ongoing, with new facilities opening in 2025
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Rethinking construction for today’s world

Considering how the complexities of construction have changed to tackle today’s issues, such as meeting Net Zero targets, increased efficiency and driving positive social impacts. Our kit-of-parts approach harnesses technology and a new way of doing things to simplify these complexities. The project for Manchester Airport is one of the ways we are putting our thinking to the test. We’ve learnt a lot including how this approach can reduce site traffic on projects and can improve the working environments of construction teams.

Expanding possibilities at Manchester Airport

With a £1.3 billion ($1.65 billion) investment in place, Manchester Airport was embarking on expanding its Terminal 2 and adding 12 new gates. Minimizing passenger and operational disruption is paramount in any airport transformation project, so changing the way we build on these kinds of sites was ripe for innovation and we developed an approach that would work in and around a functioning airport.

By focusing on Industrialised Construction, we had the opportunity to develop a kit-of-parts approach – a design-for-manufacture-and-assembly (DfMA) workflow that makes the construction much more streamlined. Effectively, we would craft large pieces of the building in a factory and assemble them onsite. Like toy building blocks, but on a grand scale.

Larger parts, faster build

Usually, a project of this size would need thousands of parts, all individually brought to site in separate quantities and deliveries. Instead, the team broke each node down into a small number of components, each manufactured offsite. They transported these larger, factory-finished pieces on flatbed trucks to the airport where the team would put them in place.
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Responsive digital design

Digital technologies played a crucial role. Using manufacturing software and aligning it with more traditional construction software, and using laser-based positioning systems, we could make sure each factory piece would fit into place seamlessly on arrival, without having to adjust them to site conditions.
The new kit-of-parts approach has revolutionised the way we’re able to successfully operate and deliver projects in time restricted/critical environments. The digital design approach was invaluable for this project, and we will now be considering it for all projects of this nature moving forward. By seamlessly integrating it with our own design, fabrication, and installation methodology, we were able to manage and coordinate 100% of the steel-to-steel connection design, steelwork fabrication, intumescent fire-rated paint system and cladding application in controlled conditions within the factory, before even needing to step foot on the airport. This not only significantly reduced the demands and time of on-site crane use, and our site team’s worker-hours by over 30%, but it also significantly reduced the carbon emissions traditional methods would have required to transport.  When reflecting on this innovative approach to making construction more efficient, it’s clear that the use of responsive digital design is a must for projects of this scale going forward.

Transforming lives throughout the industry

Mace, with 30 years’ experience in airport construction, estimates that the new process moved around 5,400 working hours offsite, nearly 59% of the project.

Sustainability figures are impressive, with an estimated 125-ton fewer CO₂ emissions versus traditional methods, thanks to the efficiency of assembling parts in a factory.

At the same time, solving problems at a project level rather detail-by-detail means building on each improvement, learning faster and driving efficiency as you go. “By using a kit-of-parts approach at Manchester Airport, we were able to reduce the number of components used to build each node from over 5000 to just 67, reducing the projected construction time from hundreds to just tens of days” says Matt Randall, Pre-construction Director, Mace.

The benefits reach further than any individual project. Moving the main location of work from the site to the factory changes the nature of the building industry itself, creating safer, more consistent jobs for a more multiskilled workforce.

Meet the Visioneers

As the project progresses, we’re seeing more and more opportunities to use the kit-of-parts approach across a wide range of projects. For WSP in the UK’s Head of Innovation Dale Sinclair, who works with our engineers and designers across the world, it’s a shift that has huge potential for society.
The shift from construction to manufacturing becomes the perfect levelling-up element. It creates a revolution, not just in the way we design buildings, but how we make them and drive social value. The best part is we can still be creative, just with different constraints that will drive innovation in their own way. It’s rewriting the playbook for infrastructure delivery, laying the foundations to put communities first and creating a more sustainable, resilient future.

Other challenges that we have overcome

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