Crown House Technologies was also instrumental in the conceptual design of the airside roads and taxiway underpasses. The Southern Airside Roads form an integral part of the airport road system between the Central Terminal area and T5 Central Terminal Building.
Part of this link is via the Airside Road Tunnel (ART). The works consisted of five underpasses, one of which is curbed and 285 meters long. CHt’s work included the substructure of the Main Terminal Building, including the Railbox (underground structure for the terminal’s railway station; the first satellite terminal ( Satellite 1); the substructure of the new Air Traffic Tower; management of site logistics and all earthworks and enabling works.
The challenge
Heathrow Terminal 5 was an innovative and extremely complex multi-modal transport interchange designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century and handle up to 30 million passengers a year.
- Three year duration
- Leadership value £150m
- Contract value £110m
- Five sub-projects
- Management of £3m spend per month at peak
CHt's challenges were:
- To successfully deliver the MEP services for the largest construction project in Europe at the time.
- A challenge from the client to remove 60% of the traditional labour through the use of our prefabrication experience.
- Lead the project commissioning strategy interfacing with baggage handling, Flight Information Systems and site wide security systems.
All of these were addressed through an innovative contract (T5 Agreement) which promoted a collaborative open book approach.
Successful industrial relations were also instrumental to the success, playing amajor part in the development and management of the innovative Major Projects Agreement. This offered a consistant site wide collaborative platform for dispute and grievance resolution, which succeeded in delivering no MEP industrial action for the entire duration of the project.
Our approach
Our approach delivered improved programme control, risk management, improved quality and required fewer on-site resources leading to a far safer site. The project utilised our CHt Manufacturing capability to adopt lean production methods and add value throughout the project in terms of cost, programme, logistics quality and on-site health & safety.
The project at its peak had a labour force of over 500 operatives on site, over 60% of which were direct CHt employees from the south east of England. Through our innovative approach and methodology, and our commitment to our framework agreements, our strategy also enabled us to support the local community and people development, setting new standards in the construction industry.
Our engineering behind our delivery
Our Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) strategy to deliver building services modules from our factory delivered major benefits in safety, quality, cost, reliability and environmental impact and reduced the reliance on a large numbers of skilled local operatives.
We were able to construct many component assemblies off site, pre-commission them in a controlled environment, and finally lift and position them on site. We delivered over 1,400 modules, representing 202,000 hours of assembling time for multi-service distribution risers, plantrooms, pipework modules, skid mounted plant, and corridor multi service units.