Bromford, L&Q, Notting Hill Genesis and Origin Housing are working in conjunction with Coadjute, a blockchain-style platform for decentralised workflow and data sharing, to improve safety, quality and accountability in housing projects.
The group’s Quality Chain project is currently at a proof-of-concept stage, with the aim of creating a market-ready product by March 2020.
Based on R3’s Corda distributed-ledger technology, the Coadjute platform is designed to unify the various organisations involved in the development of housing projects from inception through to construction and occupation. Quality Chain captures and tracks a single version of key decisions, documentation and information, creating a ‘golden thread’ of accountability and transparency identified as necessary by the Hackitt Report.
At the moment, each of the parties involved in the construction and occupation of houses, such as architects, developers, clients, subcontractors and housing providers, operates their own separate systems, with gaps in information, inefficiencies and fragmented communication being the inevitable results. Quality Chain, a decentralised system based on blockchain technology, removes these problems by enabling each party to share a single source of the truth as a foundation for trust while also retaining their own technology and data, the latter being a key regulatory requirement.
Matthew Gardiner, head of ideation, L&Q, said, “Quality Chain provides a method for all organisations involved in housing development to come to an agreement on any obligation, statement of work, deliverable or document, providing a ‘single source of the truth’ as the basis for improving workflows and efficiency.”
Quality Chain is intended to provide an immutable history of decisions made throughout a project and the provenance of all documents and specifications iterated and agreed in the process. Not only is this expected to reduce costs for the different organisations involved, it will also mitigate the risk of potentially dangerous decisions being made or unsuitable components being used.
John Reynolds, CEO and founder, Coadjute, said, “The UK’s housing building targets can’t be achieved without a thorough overhaul of the technology underpinning construction. We believe blockchain provides the opportunity to unify, simplify and validate every stage in an otherwise complex process and create a trusted, immutable record, to which all parties contribute and agree.”
