Merit Holdings has always had a reputation for engineering solutions to suit the most complex of buildings or locations. In 2002, Merit’s CEO, Tony Wells, took over Merit, a 2M turnover piping company, based in the North East of England. At that time, the business was near insolvency, and Tony repurposed the business to focus on self-delivery of mechanical pipework and cleanrooms, a decision which has led to the company’s success today.
In 2004, Merit opened its first offsite factory, where projects such as Diamond Light Synchrotron and Halley VI were manufactured offsite and shipped to Oxford and Antarctica respectively.
For the next decade, Merit continued to design and build complex facilities using a range of traditional methods and offsite construction methods for clients such as GSK, Francis Crick Institute, Rolls-Royce and Harrods.
In 2018, working with innovator Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, Merit used it Pre-Assembled Modules (PAM) technology to offsite manufacture 60% of the facility in just over 9 months, a year faster than traditional methods.
This led to a new approach to delivering complex facilities. Using the modular ‘Pre-Assembled Modules’ (PAMs) system that proved so successful for Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult’s facility expansion, Merit invested heavily in developing this system to increase its design platform and offsite manufactured products.
The product range now includes patent pending systems such as FLEXI POD and UltraPOD, which are chosen depending on the customer’s requirements for speed of construction, cost, site constraints and process/product manufacturing flow.
These products are pre-designed based on a regulatory approved MEP/architectural design platform, which is adapted to customer specific applications and is deeply integrated into the validation process in order that a more productive, consistent and successful outcome is achieved. The design period is significantly reduced by using these standardised designs, allowing for PODs and PAMs to go into manufacture quickly. Project delivery times for a project from inception to time to use can be cut by up to 70% to deliver whatever process and building layout is needed.
Using the platform, we can achieve 97% offsite manufacturing of MEP systems with zero scope 1 carbon emission design whilst providing >50% plant space reduction and improved services distribution. Designs offer lower energy consumption and high quality environmental conditions required for healthcare and biopharma manufacturing with HEPA filtration used to minimise airborne infection risk. All these provide consequential benefit to overall costs both in terms of capital investment and ongoing revenue including maintenance and energy.
Improving productivity
“Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything” [Paul Krugman; 2021].
Improving construction productivity is something of a personal crusade for Merit CEO, Tony Wells who has led the re-invention of the way Merit delivers projects with a radically different ‘clean sheet of paper’ re-think of the complete construction value chain. This is for the most part the complete opposite to traditional Tier 1 / fragmented design delivery since Productivity in construction has hardly improved in decades and is now a major road block to UK growth as a whole.
Highlighting the problem is not new. As long ago as The Egan Report in 1998 identified the issues and proposed radical change; ‘What we are proposing is a radical change in the way we build. We wish to see, within five years, the construction industry deliver its products to its customers in the same way as the best consumer-lead manufacturing and service industries’. [Egan:1998].
Unfortunately, the construction industry, both contractors, designer and clients largely ignored these wise words of advice however, Merit has embraced the opportunity to drive its productivity through digital design, automated manufacturing, product based delivery and project management integration using Revit, Assemble Systems and Viewpoint a Common Data Environment platform for all projects.
The significant advantage utilising this approach is that adaptable, standardised designs can be digitally engineered in real time during design workshops to produce outputs there and then. Output focused workshops, where all stakeholders can actively collaborate in real time, are incredibly productive and significantly reduce the time taken to deliver a finalised approved design.
This product based approach that can be customised to exact customer needs has dramatically reduced the time it takes Merit and its customers to finalise their optimum design without compromise and is one of the improvements that enables Merit to deliver its projects quicker.
Tony quoted, “Merit’s primary focus in the last 5 years has been a complete rethink of all of our business processes to provide a complete digital integration. We are not yet finished but we are well on the way and current projects are seeing these benefits. Vertically integrated Product based factory manufacturing is needed to take Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) to the next level of manufacturing maturity and where they can be applied successfully, in particularly, in heavily regulated environments such as healthcare and Biopharmaceuticals, where exponential growth in new projects is expected. Our solution for complex buildings incorporates zero scope 1 carbon emission / aggressive total life cycle carbon reduction and factory-manufactured solutions that deliver affordable costs in significantly shorter timescales compared to traditional construction.”
Tackling Challenges
The road to developing these products has not gone without its challenges.
Tony says, “The impact from BREXIT, COVID, and the war in Ukraine, coupled with a sharp rise in construction activity, is having a significant adverse impact on the construction industry in the U.K., increasing prices and causing material and labour shortages.”
However, Merit has mitigated for many of these issues by using several key methodologies;
Platform Design with Embedded Partners: Utilising an adaptable and customisable standardised design allows the organization to pre-specify components and engage with its material supply chain on deliveries so that appropriate stock can be maintained and available as needed to maintain a programme.
U.K.-based Materials and Embedded Supply Chain: Embedded partners working on Merit projects are engaged in a project from start to end. This collaborative way of working often makes sure that these partners work with the company repeatedly, enabling it to plan for the manufacturing slots. Merit prioritises its embedded suppliers so that material supply issues can be mitigated through guaranteed supply.
Factory-based Manufacturing with Merit Direct Employees: Merit has not experienced the same shortfall of construction workers experienced by Traditional UK Construction due to it’s extensive training, apprentice and graduate training programmes rather than short term, reliance on EU workers who are no longer freely available after Brexit.
Wells comments: “the UK needs to invest in R&D and home grown skills and Merit is focused on in-house training and recruitment programmes for long term. High paid, productive, directly employed staff based in the UK and manufacturing in Northumberland”.
Working with innovators who recognise the benefits of MMC
The UK government is fixated on paying millions of pounds on consultants’ fees to develop designs that are not fit for purpose or manufactured. This traditional ‘groundhog day reinvent the wheel’ prototyping has dogged the industry over decades and is one of the fundamental road blocks to improving productivity. Merit’s transformational business strategy is to move away from this type of behavior and is a key part of our intellectual property and value-based product solution.
We have seen significant uptake in our product offering in the last year, working with some of the most prolific innovators in the UK, including Autolus, Piramal, CPI and Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, all of whom recognize the benefits of MMC and Merit’s platform.
In 2021, Merit was awarded the prestigious, 66M, Autolus’ new CAR-T Cell Therapy manufacturing facility, the 1st of its kind in the UK. A facility that will manufacture 2000 therapies annually, bringing this advanced therapy to the UK for the first time from the US. Autolus will be designed and built including planning approval in just 22 months using the FLEXI POD platform compared to a traditional approach of 4½ years.
Shortly after the Autolus contract was announced, Merit won a £30m project with Piramal to build a new cancer drug manufacturing facility in Grangemouth, Scotland. Again, using Merit’s patent pending FLEXI POD® product will save considerable time to enable manufacturing of ADC’s quicker than constructing it in a traditional manner. The project will take 16 months to complete, a stark contrast to the 3 years it would take to design and build the new facility traditionally.
In the next month, Merit expects a number of new contracts will be awarded, including a community hospital, as well as further projects in advanced therapies and biopharma.
The Steadfast Leader
Tony Wells took over Merit, a £2m turnover piping company in the N.E., in August 2002. Since then, he organically grew the company’s cleanroom and pipework business, emphasizing offsite manufacturing and delivering many iconic projects like Diamond Light Synchrotron and Halley VI. In 2017, Tony re-invented the organization’s delivery to product-based digitally engineering factory manufacturing to deliver CGT Catapult Biotech and UK BIC Dry-room projects.
Tony’s first role after Newcastle University was Electrical/ Control Engineering at British Steel Teesside. It was a fantastic IEE Chartered Engineering Training Program with various assignments, from project design and delivery to shift-based operations and fault findings on plants, including steel plants, plate mills, and coke ovens.
Then in 1990, he joined Fujitsu’s new construction semi-conductor cleanroom manufacturing facility. After spending considerable time in Japan, with roles in both management and engineering, Tony revamped the entire facility MEP controls to a PLC and DCS system, self-delivering the design, software, and commissioning, providing a detailed understanding of each system functionality.
In 1996, he joined the seniors team at Siemens new DRAM wafer Fab and oversaw project construction and facility operations. He headed Siemens’ Semiconductor worldwide benchmarking program of optimized water fab design and construction, generating 4,000 pages of analysis and writing published articles and an unfinished Ph.D. thesis. Later in 1999, he moved from manufacturing to construction as M.D. of two M+W Zander start-ups in the U.K. and New York State.
Driving Factors
Merit’s people are at the core of the company’s offering. In the last year, the workforce has gone from 110 staff to over 250, demonstrating the growth of the company and interest in its product based solution. At the current rate of growth, a further 100 staff are expected to join in 2022 alone.
By switching to a vertically integrated factory-based solution centred around standardized digital engineering and 4D BIM, Merit has been able to address the skill shortage with flexible working, significant new graduate and apprenticeship programmes which have improved demographics and construction’s mental health crisis by minimising site teams and working from home.
We have invested heavily in standardization and automation, embedding the leanest of manufacturing processes into our own, purchasing equipment to improve productivity, including a UR Welding Robot, which will arrive at the Merit factory in July.
Picture of the Future
Tony says, “Merit is known in the last 20 years for designing and building complex facilities, but we have re-invented the whole company into a technology and productivity driven manufacturing start-up, which does very little the same now as it did even 4 years ago.”
Merit’s solution for complex buildings incorporates zero carbon emission and factory-manufactured solutions, which deliver affordable costs in a significantly reduced timeframe compared to traditional construction.
The organization is currently expecting a 200% increase in sales compared to last year. With the number set to triple by the end of next year, Merit is increasing its offsite manufacturing capacity to 300,000 square feet this year, with further expansion planned for 2023.