INNA LIM
BUILD BACK BETTER & SMARTER
Wates Construction Group recently appointed Inna Lim as its new Strategy and Integration Director. We caught up with her to find out more about emerging technologies, innovation and championing more offsite manufacture.
1 Q: As new Strategy and Integration Director at Wates, can you say more about the role and what you want to achieve with it?
So, starting with the customers and end users in mind and then working backwards to our pre-construction and operational activities.
Inna Lim (IL): I am accountable for driving a new integrated business across the Wates Construction Group. This a new role and together with key members from our engineering and specialist businesses – SES Engineering Services, Wates Building Services, Wates Dry Lining Services and Prism Offsite Manufacturing – we aim to create a unique market offering that gives Wates Group a competitive advantage across a number of sectors. Most importantly, I want to help our organisation offer construction and engineering solutions that are built around our customers’ needs.
Q: What are the benefits of integrating the four businesses and what do you hope to achieve?
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IL: Ultimately, this is about delivering efficiencies and adding value for our clients and business. But it’s also responding to a range of challenges UK construction companies face today – be it pandemic-related or age-old problems relating to efficiency and quality. Our primary objective here is to share the technical expertise, capabilities and thinking from our four specialist businesses within the Wates Construction Group. Our industry
peers continue to approach offsite manufacturing as an isolated concept, but we plan to dominate this space by enhancing our existing offsite facility, Prism, and developing a fully integrated in-house capability of smart offsite solutions. This will provide our customers with rapid and optimum solutions and support during the project’s life cycle. Q: Prism has been hugely successful in delivering prefabricated MEP with a modular approach – will the facility be developed further and is offsite MEP still not fully understood by the wider construction industry? IL: We’re putting a lot of energy into enhancing the capabilities and capacity of our Prism facility –
WWW.OFFSITEMAGAZINE.CO.UK | AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021
