Focused Strategy

The alliance currently consists of 23 founding Registered Providers and is continually growing, now including local authorities, city regions and combined authorities, all of whom have a strategic intent to grow their offsite housing portfolio.

Supply chain partners have been procured through a carefully crafted OSHA MMC Framework process with the contracting authority now being managed by one of OSHA’s founding pioneers (Great Places Housing Group). This has deliberately taken almost 2 years to complete, along with the many tools and processes needed to support it to ensure a robust mechanism that won’t fall foul of market changes or lack of insight and control. This is now a dedicated and wholly owned OSHA MMC Framework, which is set up as a not for profit entity. It has been designed to support the OSHA client partners and the OSHA supply chain partners. There are now a significant number of assets and processes that OSHA has developed, to manage the affordable MMC housing solutions now available in numerous MMC formats, as this is a focus on process and not so much the MMC technologies themselves, which have been around for decades and as far back as 1827, if you search hard enough for modular volumetric homes (snippet here).

Homes England and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) have been supporting OSHA through the development phases and continue to do so, to achieve greater delivery of affordable MMC homes. We are also welcoming new client partners across the RP, LA, City Region and Combined Authorities areas, where zero carbon affordable housing development is a strategic priority, especially in MMC formats where greater control is unquestionable and well documented now.

The OSHA Development Timeline

As a recap, here is how OSHA has been developed through the discovery and development phases and subsequently set up to deliver in the deployment and operational phases inline with the OSHA strategic business plan.

FOUNDATION PHASE 1 (November 2020 – April 2021)

The programme was established to form the alliance, set up the governance and road mapping and to start the engagement of the supply chain partners, coordinated by a Project Director and the expert working groups. A full Business Case was produced and followed meticulously to ensure this focussed strategy did not digress, as there have been many opportunities to re-tune along the way due to the uncertain landscape and economic climate we have faced.

DISCOVERY PHASES 2 & 3 (May 2021- April 2022)

These 2 stages combined, focussed on the exploration and early development, looking at designs, land availability, assessing individual client needs, real performance monitoring, off-site technology analysis and certification positions, as an example of the many areas that now form part of the PMO KPI and Dashboard check lists. The bulk of this work resulted in the OSHA process control now operated within the PMO and commonly known as the OSHA Eco System.

DEVELOPMENT PHASE 4 (May 2022 – December 2022)

Here OSHA focussed very heavily on the final gathering and analysis of the model / modus operandi / Eco System that we had discussed and developed with a significant number of industry partners and clients, specifically manufacturers via soft market testing and focus group activities, to ensure we had full visibility of what was achievable and of course, the appetite for continuity considering the risks and opportunities we identified on both sides of the table. This phase of the development also focussed on the potential for a number of the strategic partners to set up its own delivery model (MMC Assembly Hub/Factory) with potential supply chain partners and this is now being analysed for delivery in a final business case with several strategic partners within OSHA, along with a dedicated R&D hub, now known as the Off-Site Performance Centre (OPC) and also part of the OSHA Eco System.

DEPLOYMENT PHASE (January 2023 – March 2023)

The Project Director, the newly commissioned expert MMC PMO team and Supply Chain Partners entered into a stress testing phase to ensure that all procedures, governance, signed contracts, tools and more importantly, designs and pipeline visibility were in place to ensure a smooth operational rollout with a clear path towards the start of the aggregated demand for high quality affordable homes for our residents, that we have been working tirelessly to achieve using MMC technologies and the DfMA process of engagement.

OPERATIONAL PHASE (April 2023 onwards)

In April 2023, OSHA formally launched the OSHA process of engagement with a full team of operational partners. The pipeline of activity started to roll out and the supply chain partners started to integrate with the client partners, as the OSHA Project Director and PMO started to use the toolkit of processes and procedures to support the clients and their projects, via the framework (and outside of the framework if required). The ambition to hit the target of 10,000 MMC built homes per annum (which was the mixed traditional and MMC build programme of the original 23 pioneers back in 2019) only using high PMV MMC technologies, is now the focussed next target of the OSHA team. A target with a firm control over the quality of homes, the real performance of homes, and the affordable low energy and operational carbon output of those homes as a must have.

Significant detail of OSHA’s plans and activities, industry reports and intelligence are available to full members of OSHA via a Document Management System in the partners area.

Recommended reading

Learn more about the OSHA delivery process and range of OSHA assets here.

The full stakeholder list can be seen here with a further insight into the supply chain, project director and PMO team on this page.