From one responsible party to a global supply chain

Michael O'Reilly traced the change from his own experience. When he started with a traditional design-and-construct façade subcontractor in the mid-1990s, the only imported element was the glass; design, engineering, manufacture, fabrication, assembly and installation were all handled locally and in-house. If something went wrong, whether in design, in the factory or as a defect, there was one company and one phone call. Manufacturing has since moved offshore in pursuit of cheaper pricing, and with it, O'Reilly said, Australia has lost much of its local capability, leaving a heavy reliance on overseas procurement. The models have multiplied alongside that shift: hybrid design-and-construct, builder self-perform, and arrangements in which a supplier designs, supplies and ships, after which the designers are never seen again. All of them can succeed. The question is whether the delivery team has named the risks each one carries.

Winnie Sun set out those risks from the consultant's side. The first is whether an overseas supplier genuinely knows how to design and supply a compliant system under the relevant Australian standards and the National Construction Code, and, for a New South Wales project, whether it is familiar with the Design and Building Practitioners Act and able to issue a full design documentation package meeting those additional requirements. The second is testing: whether the supplier has carried out the relevant Australian tests at a NATA-accredited laboratory, or at least a locally accredited laboratory certified to perform them. The third is the design team itself, which must coordinate accurately and promptly with the architect, builder and façade consultant, and then translate that information back to its own drafting office and, critically, to the factory making the panels.

Tran Van Tien approached the same territory as a supplier entering a new market. Uncontrolled risk, he said, costs money and, worse, costs brand reputation. His answer is to settle matters with a partner before a contract is carried out rather than after: clear agreement on legal and customer requirements, an inspection regime agreed in advance, and a plan for checking quality step by step as work proceeds, from incoming material onwards. Language is a live risk in that process, and Tien argued that face-to-face meetings are what resolve the misunderstandings email leaves in place. BM Windows, he said, set its factory up to international standards, with its key machinery sourced from Europe, precisely so that the process could be controlled in-house.

Weighing risk against reward

Due diligence, in Sun's account, is the upfront work that reduces all of this: verifying the design, manufacturing and financial capabilities of a prospective supplier thoroughly before award, then, once a reliable one is found, working with it repeatedly so that each party learns what the other expects across design, manufacturing, logistics and site installation. O'Reilly described the same instinct institutionalised. Over four years Hutchinson Builders has built an internal façade team that sits outside the construction reporting line, and for the past 18 months it has been auditing which suppliers project teams use and going overseas to examine the supply chain behind them, including where the float glass originates.

> I see more reward than risk. I always recommend: get to know the supplier, talk to him, go to his facility. -- Giuseppe Michael Schmidt, BM Windows

The rewards, Sun said, start with the cost benefit that brings clients to the conversation in the first place, but do not end there. Overseas procurement widens the range of glass and aluminium profile systems available to realise a particular architectural idea, and offshore manufacturing skill can deliver intricate, complex façade details for which it is increasingly difficult to source an Australian maker, and to do so more cost-effectively. O'Reilly added the argument from exposure: seeing how others build teaches different materials and smarter methods. He noted projects that never proceeded because the architectural renders could not be matched in reality.

Quality control starts before the first panel

> I don't think I've ever been involved in a job where anyone's followed the requirements of a spec 100% to the letter, but if there's a problem everyone's very quick to pull out the spec. -- Michael O'Reilly, Hutchinson Builders

Giuseppe Michael Schmidt argued that the procedures matter more than the postcode. Quality control begins inside the manufacturer's facility, at the smallest component: a machined part is checked before it reaches assembly, and the checklists are only as good as the awareness of the departments, project management, design, engineering, factory and installation, that have to run them. On large projects a QA/QC procedure is usually specified, and BM Windows sits down with consultants, developers and the design team to work through it and update it project-specifically. The company participates in prequalification, collaborates with third-party inspection, and operates what Schmidt called an open-door policy for clients wanting to see the process themselves.

> In our industry the QA/QC procedure is pretty much standardised. What is most important is trust and transparency and collaboration. -- Giuseppe Michael Schmidt, BM Windows

> Spend the money to carry out the testing; it would save you more money later to fix the defect. -- Winnie Sun, Xavier Knight

Sun's case for testing was made against a habit she and O'Reilly both recognised: elaborate comparison reports assembled to justify why a performance mock-up should not be run, and builders reading the test as pure cost and programme impact. Better, she argued, to send a consultant to witness the mock-up test overseas and find the problem there than to discover it once panels are manufactured or installed. Xavier Knight has developed its own QA and QC flowchart covering the design life of a project, and sends engineers to carry out periodic site inspections against the approved and declared documentation.

Distance, language and the limits of email

Compliance itself has to be learned rather than assumed. Schmidt said the architecture, requirements and codes in Australia differ from other markets he has worked in, and that understanding them is homework to be completed before entering the market, not after selling a product; BM Windows has three Australian projects to date. Sun noted that most overseas suppliers serving Australia are in South East Asia, where technical language differences invite misinterpretation of specification and design intent, and that suppliers who resist adapting their own way of doing things are the hardest to bring into compliance. O'Reilly's example was smaller and sharper: red-pen markups repeatedly missed by an offshore drawing office because the boss did not allow colour printing, which cost weeks until someone flew over and saw it. Distance can be worked around, as Schmidt showed with a Boston project inspected online from Canada during the pandemic, but all four preferred the table and the drawing.