To solve a design resource challenge in our East region they recruited an external supplier to perform some contract design work, the company chosen was Jorvik Design Group. Jorvik were engaged to perform survey, design, and re-design work on some of the BDUK contract areas.
Jorvik completed 6 designs (4,000 POTs) successfully, with 50% already successfully reviewed by our civils contractors. Overall Jorvik’s designs are of a very good quality and we and Jorvik were able to improve our design processes and standards through this exercise
Improvements have been made related to Deliverability, Maintenance and Simplicity:
- Jorvik have focused hard to minimise the wayleave requirements, which has resulted in noticeable cost savings when compared to the High Level Design.
- Careful consideration of areas of environmental interest were included, which resulted in a slight increase in trench meterage, but drastically improved the simplicity of the design and thus its deliverability.
- Designs have been optimised in such a way to work with local construction techniques and road traffic management requirements at junctions. An example being the addition of footway chambers in front of every customer drop cabinet allowing easier installation of ducting and simplifying future maintenance of the network.
- Missed properties were added in to further improve build cost.
- Jorvik’s experience with other FTTP providers enabled them to highlight multiple PIA (use of other operators shared infrastructure) solutions and their associated cost savings.
- Photo Documentation – Detailed photo documentation was recorded and provided to Gigaclear. This provided live data of the local topography and aided the validation process.
This engagement with an external design agency has been a learning experience for Gigaclear that will benefit us longer term and as a result, we are now working through a Design/ Delivery/Contract Partner coaching program, whereby all parties better understand the others aims, preferences and restrictions. The output of this will be an additional quality gate between design and validation. Following completion of the trial and detailed analysis, the East region recommended that Gigaclear proceed to enable Jorvik to complete additional designs for other regions within the company. At the time of going to print, the first designs for the West region are being surveyed and designed by Jorvik Design Group.
