No matter where you are in Australia, all SHAPE sites offer the same experience. From a remote modular project in Coober Pedy to a multi-million-dollar fitout in Sydney’s CBD, our clients and subbies can walk onsite and know it’s a SHAPE project by our focus on customer experience, safety, quality, and sustainability.
We have created consistent industry-leading worksites through a unique internal program that focuses on excellence and continuous improvement across a broad range of project delivery disciplines.
More than five years ago, our CEO, Peter Marix-Evans envisioned enhancing the SHAPE client and subbie experience throughout the project delivery phases, in addition to our existing focus on the final product. Peter believed that by establishing and maintaining project sites that provide our client and subcontractor stakeholders with a workplace destination where people want to be, the project deliverables and disciplines would organically improve.
The key to a high-quality product is the journey – it’s the people who imagined it, designed it, and built it that make it what it is – and creating the right site environment is critical to how people feel during the build. Creating a site that people feel they belong in and that respects their contribution to the project plays a key part to positive mental health and many other project delivery factors, including safety, quality, environmental sustainability, and productivity. With all of this in mind a unique internal program was born, known as the Operational Excellence Program (OPEX).
A key component of our OPEX Program is an annual event where representatives from each state are selected to travel to best-in-class project sites in other regions on an assignment of discovery, connecting with likeminded counterparts, sharing ideas and initiatives, completing project reviews, documenting and photographing examples of project excellence. Learnings are then shared across the business nationally which often later form part of our SHAPE Minimum Standards.
The OPEX Program achieves three key objectives:
We have created consistent industry-leading worksites through a unique internal program that focuses on excellence and continuous improvement across a broad range of project delivery disciplines.
Over the last five years, we have seen improvements across our operational excellence measures. In FY23, we recorded a world-class client NPS of 84+, TRIFR improved by 43% to 3.8, LTIFR improved by 55% to 0.9, and 92% of our projects achieved Perfect Delivery status as measured by our clients.
These are some of the strategies and innovations we have implemented over the years:
In September 2023, our OPEX program involved 14 of our people visiting sites within each of our state and territory operations across Australia. A key insight from this year’s event is increased adoption of emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). With the possibility to increase savings, reduce waste, alleviate design challenges, and improve the client experience, we predict we will continue to see a rise in these technologies in the building industry over the next five years and are currently exploring the broader deployment of this technology within our expanding business model.