Sustainable construction - implementing targets and indicators. Experiences from CIRIA's Pioneers' Club (C633)

A key performance indicator (KPI) measures the performance of an activity that is important to the success of a company. The indicator’s role is to enable the recording of progress towards pre-set achievable targets for that activity. Despite intensive development of industry KPIs, practical understanding of their implementation is in its infancy. This book describes the trialling of a set of KPIs for sustainable construction and distils the lessons learned to enable their dissemination to the wider industry.

The approach involved the formation of a club of 10 major companies that demonstrated a strong willingness to exchange ideas and to share detailed information from their extensive experiences. Its goal was to understand from a practical perspective the role of indicators in driving the participating companies, and the industry in general, towards the reporting of real performance improvement against a standard set of clearly defined sustainability criteria.

Defined carefully, KPIs may provide a route to external benchmarking of performance, enabling well-performing companies to be more readily distinguished from competition in the marketplace and ultimately for industry leaders to be compared by investors against their peers in other sectors. The Pioneers Club recognised that a trial of the sustainable construction indicators by companies in real conditions was a vital step to the wider adoption of the approach.

Key words: environmental good practice, waste minimisation, sustainable construction, site management, project management, sustainable resource use, organisational innovation, supply chain management, benchmarking and KPIs, recycling and reclaimed materials, whole life costing.

ISBN: 978-0-86017-633-6

Author: J Kersey

Number of pages: 100 (paperback)

Publisher: CIRIA

Date of Publication: November 2004