Procurement and supply chain
Construction projects are increasingly large and complex, with evolving legislative, regulatory, customer, social, and investor requirements to meet.
Yet skill shortages and recent supply chain consolidation often mean demand exceeds supplier capacity. In a seller’s market, contractors and specialist suppliers are picking their work, meaning many can be booked well into the future.
These challenges can only be navigated with an approach to procurement that is tailored to your unique needs, constraints, and opportunities.
Our strength in procurement and supply chain management enables you to attract the highest quality supplier bids and set your projects and programs up for success.
What can we do for you?
Our approach is built on:
- Deep subject matter knowledge of your business, your assets, projects, and programs, and the big picture for the sector you’re in.
- Breadth and depth of practice — our multidisciplinary, multisectoral expertise provides transferable knowledge and solutions, injects new thinking, and promotes innovation.
- Whole lifecycle capability — we put together a bespoke team with the right skills mix for you and your project needs, from new development to asset end of life.
This enables you to:
Manage your inflation and supply bottlenecks
Combining technical and wide market knowledge with focused market research, we understand your project or program and its local, national, and global context. We reveal the availability of key supplier competencies and capacity, and of project critical equipment and materials — from heavy lift cranes and dredgers to steel sections and microchips. This supports development of your procurement strategy, by talking to suppliers of hard-to-get products and services about increasing production, prepurchasing, and scheduling of work.
Attract high-performing contractors and suppliers
Demonstrating your project pipeline’s potential work and revenue, and the opportunity to improve supply chain profitability through learning, better working practices, and innovation, we ensure you stand out to in-demand contractors and suppliers. We help build better partnerships and working relationships, with value and influence.
Early contractor involvement can give suppliers important insight into and influence on workload, and reveals to you what is technically and commercially attractive to suppliers. Contractor alliances can be encouraged to achieve the required capability and capacity for them to bid and win.
Use higher performing, responsive delivery models
We can design commercial arrangements to set target outputs and outcomes without specifying inputs, empowering contractors and suppliers to play to their strengths and innovate. This equitably shares risk and reward.
Engage stakeholders to maximize value
We ensure your prequalification questionnaires and invitations to tender reflect what’s important to you. We take input from your internal stakeholders on the needs of your different functions, as well as engaging regulators, community and special interest groups, investors, and suppliers to identify key considerations. We help you weight each requirement, embed it in procurement processes, score bidders’ responses, and monitor performance.
Support corporate sustainability goals
Procurement is essential to meeting sustainability commitments, as a substantial proportion of your organization’s material impacts — climate, environmental, and social — arise within your supply chain. We bring our integrated leadership, from coauthoring the international specification for managing built environment carbon emissions, PAS 2080, to pioneering the planning, delivery, and management of social value in infrastructure.
We’re working with English water companies on resource planning and large strategic schemes that will make England’s water supplies resilient against drought and shortages for the coming decades.
Efficient procurement and supply chain solutions for global projects
Our procurement advice is strategic. It looks at the entire landscape of social, technical, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical factors that will influence the performance of projects and programs. And it looks well into the future. For most projects that means five years ahead, and for many a decade or two.
We emphasize collaboration to achieve procurement strategies that reflect the diverse needs and objectives of the different parts of your business.
Our experience
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Anglian Water Strategic Pipeline Alliance, East of England, UKWe have supported Anglian Water to establish a complex multidisciplinary supply chain capable of meeting more than 70 requirements as diverse as network modeling, archeology, mains laying, and supply of precast concrete components, steel and plastic pipelines, valves, and fixtures. The alliance contract and commercial model foster collaborative working.
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China General Nuclear Power Group and EDF Energy alliance procurement and contract strategy, UKWe are augmenting CGN's and EDF’s procurement resources over the course of the programs to deliver two new nuclear power stations, Bradwell B and Sizewell C. Our role includes developing procurement and contracting strategies, managing commercial relationships and contract management.
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Defense Infrastructure Organization supply chain strategy, CyprusWe interviewed senior Ministry of Defense staff to capture requirements and carried out a comprehensive review of the Cypriot construction supply chain. We developed strategies for packaging different asset types for procurement — for example, headquarter facilities, family accommodation, office facilities, and schools. And we developed routes to market, a procurement process and a contracting approach, then led early market engagement interviews with suppliers.
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Department for Education’s Alliance for Learning, UKWe developed a bespoke alliancing methodology enabling the department to procure suppliers for a program of new school construction, employing standardized modules and components, offsite manufacturing and assembly techniques, and achieving net-zero carbon emissions. Our solution aggregated demand across multiple schools, which enabled contractors to earn back investment in innovation and realise efficiencies of scale. The construction program was let to an alliance of three contractors.
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National Highways M25 and A249 DBFO commercial and contractual support, UKWe provided the necessary expertise to develop performance measurement and reporting for this major design, build, finance, and operate contract. The eight-year role provided National Highways with in-depth knowledge of the contract and supplier performance. That enabled contractual interventions to improve project performance, saving £60 million. We developed a bespoke strategic change process for future major DBFO projects.
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Neptune Bulk Terminals, Saskatchewan, CanadaWe were retained as part of a joint venture to aid Neptune Terminals in an expansion with the goal of increasing potash export capacity and reduce operational costs. The joint venture provided rail engineering, project management, construction management, contract administration, project controls services, and document control. The expansion increased Neptune’s annual potash capacity by about 30 percent.
Carbon Portal
Identify, calculate, and reduce embodied and operational carbon emissions. This infrastructure carbon calculator is aligned to PAS 2080, the international specification for managing carbon across the built environment (coauthored by Mott MacDonald). It allows anyone across your business and supply chain to identify and calculate carbon emissions, not just carbon experts.
